Hey OB, I have a hunch that we might live in the same city.
It’s funny seeing things I wrote a while ago pulled up again. I’ve hashed and rehashed my X and my marriage to death because it was necessary at the time, but the words have served their purpose and I no longer feel the desperate urge to reflect and make sense of it all. It happened. It’s over. The wound has healed cleanly because I leaned into the pain until it didn’t hurt anymore.
I’m glad you found them useful anyway. However, I do still spend a teeny bit of time puzzling out this parenting stuff.
My X is a performative parent: he only acts the part if he has an audience. Fortunately for me, he has never put in any effort to find one other than his immediate family and OW and co. He seems to spend a lot of his parenting time with OW’s family. It makes me wonder if he has many friends left. I don’t think he’s very comfortable on his own with S2.
As many people predicted, now that we’ve agreed on a parenting plan for the next two years, there’s complete silence on his end about actually doing it. So we’re still on the same visitation schedule put in place when he left nearly two years ago. Two hours twice a week and every second Sunday.
He’s never asked or tried to phone or video chat, doesn’t follow up when I inform him our son is unwell, doesn’t try to make up missed visits. He literally doesn’t exist outside of his visitation time which, according to S2, consists of ice cream, TV, and being anywhere except home alone with his dad
Not sure what’s going on with X this week but he has been really late to every changeover without any notice. I haven’t said anything because it hasn’t impacted my time yet. This morning when I opened the door, S2 stared thoughtfully at his dad for a long second, then said “Dad, Mama is not your friend”. X replied “I’m not Mama’s friend? Aww.”
