Changes.

Our next plan of action is to change the weekend arrangements. We are to suggest that my husbands daughter, instead of being collected Saturday evening and returned home Sunday evening every weekend, we alternate them. My husband collects her Friday evening and returns her home Sunday evening. In theory, she will be here two nights so she can settle in and be more involved with our family. I always thought what a silly arrangement it was for her to come for twenty-four hours. By the time she has settled in, she is going home. It will then give me a weekend off if she continues to be hostile towards me. I am hoping I can cope with two days a fortnight.

I doubt this will be convenient with her mother. I still believe that she cant wait to have her weekends without her own daughter, so suggesting this to her, I'm sure will have some excuse as to why it cant happen. But then thinking about it, she will have a whole weekend too. For me, it will free up a weekend so I can visit my son more frequently. This seems like such a better idea. My husband seems in agreement also but I do sense that even though he will have contact for longer, the idea of seeing her every weekend is more appealing to him. He knows suggesting this new arrangement is a hopeless case though. Having to "ask " to change plans simply to be told "no" makes him wonder why he is even going to bother to try. His ex wife likes to be in control and by saying no she is doing exactly that.

Regarding the party situation and my husbands ex wife accepting them on our behalf, he has asked that he be given the decision to accept or decline. She has accommodated him recently, but this hasn't been the first time and she slipped back into her controlling ways after a few weeks so it certainly wont be long before she is taking control of our weekends again. She just can’t help herself!
My husband and I (I sound like the Queen!) haven’t discussed the downside to this potential arrangement change. It all seems like a good idea but things never run smoothly, and this was another incident that did just that.

My husband returned form collecting his daughter and told me that arrangements had been changed and his ex wife was in agreement. The only problem that there was is that his daughter had swimming lessons on a Saturday. So I asked what time the lessons were. He didn’t know. I asked this because my daughter has riding lessons on a Saturday, has done for the past two years so hadn’t he thought about checking to see that they didn’t collide? Instantly this caused another heated discussion. Why was I looking for problems? I didn’t think I was. I was annoyed that he had not mentioned that he was going to change the arrangements so soon without a deciding discussion. The last thing we talked about was that he didn’t think his ex wife would go for it and he certainly never mentioned he was going to suggest the change when he left to fetch his daughter that night. We hadn’t sat down and thought about if either girl had a party on the same day, at the same time, how were we going to get each of them to their respective party at the same time? What annoyed him the most was my comment regarding his daughter swimming. I assumed that he would be expecting me to change my daughter’s horse riding to accommodate his own daughter swimming lessons. Would this be the case with the party’s too? Because he was now seeing his daughter once a fortnight, would my daughter come second to his, where organised functions were concerned. My answer to that is yes she would.

This is obviously the wrong thing to say. One minute I want to change the arrangement the next I am going back on it. How is he supposed to go back to his ex wife and tell her that he’d changed his mind because there were things we hadn’t thought about?
Had we discussed this properly instead of him jumping in feet first and making his own decision and not discussing it with me first, we wouldn’t be in this mess would we? I get so tired of not being able to make a straightforward decision. Everything has to be so thought out. What happens if this or what happens if that? It is draining. Would it be simpler to leave things as they were?

I think he sometimes forgets that we are not in a normal relationship. He has a daughter that visits once a week. I have a daughter here all of the time. If we all lived together as normal families do, and there was the odd occasion that weekend activities overlapped with each other, then you work around that. I wasn’t having my daughters arrangements changed just to accommodate my step daughters infrequent visits. Instant favouritism and another problem that I certainly didn’t want to have to deal with.