I have PR which means legally I can see them whenever I want but in practice it doesn't work like that as Andy is holding the strings on them.
I also walked out of court in April 04 (the process was nowhere near finished yet and had already gone on for 2 years - I couldn't take anymore so I read out this speech about how I had fought for 2 years and if everyone thought I was that bad a mother I was leaving) - so I read this to the judge and just walked out half way through proceedings and then collapsed in the lobby and had to have my lawyer grab me to stop me fainting.
I swore that day I would never let him control me through them again.
As a result I have no legally set down contact, no court order. He broke my court orders all the time anyway so there seems little point to me unless the judge were to slap a penal order on it.
It's not so much that he refuses every time I want them - he doesn't, it's more that he dictates when I can have contact. For instance, he was perfectly happy to bring them yesterday but because HE wanted to. When I ask he's too busy, or going to a home ed meeting (that I am not invited to).
He seems fine for them to be at my house, but oh no, he doesn't want me involved in any other aspect of their lives and he has total power to say yes or no to everything. This wrecks my self-esteem and makes me feel like his babysitter instead of the mother of his children.
Even when I do have contact which is agreeable to both of us, he then dictates what I can and cannot do. For instance, when I tried to do home ed lessons with them he got at me for not syncrinising the lessons with him - he said they should learn the same thing at both houses.
I got verbal abuse for giving dd3 medicine for ear ache. I bought dd1 a magazine which had a family tree in it and he went MAD over that because he said it was 'harping on the past' (despite the fact he shows them wedding photos) and because I listed myself as mother on the tree.
Everything he does to do with them makes me feel like nothing more than the egg donor I am going to be today. I went through the pain of birth and he ended up with all of my reason. Sometimes I feel like telling him just to take my eggs and make his own kids in a lab and then he wouldn't have to bother with a mother for them at all.
I've run out of legal aid and the only way I can get more is to go to mediation first. He has already said what he would offer me and no amount of fighting in front of the mediator will help. I suppose if we disagreed at mediation, that is my door back into court but since the last custody battle took 2 years, to be honest I don't want to do that.
I feel like I'm fighting too big a battle for them and I'm sick of him putting me down in front of them, condradicting my parenting and me always being in tears.
I am not like that on my own with Alicia - I just get reduced to tears when the others are around me. I can't check my responses around them. The whole non-custodial sitch makes me so unhappy. They seem to be the focus point for my unhappiness because it's only through them that he can still control me.
He even wanted dates once, that I would be away, for the whole year - and he sent dates he was supposed to be having dd4 FOR THE WHOLE YEAR so I wouldn't book anything on his days. He didn't even allow for holidays and yelled at me once for taking dd to the beach, and that was MY day.
It's like, oh gosh, she's having fun with the kids without me, that won't do!
Of course I deleted his list and wouldn't let him know my plans for the whole of the next year.
Anyway, I could rant about this all morning but I have to get dd4 dressed as we're going to the IVF clinic for my injections.
