What am I so scared of?

by katiekitten 69 Replies latest jw friends

katiekitten

Thank you so much everyone, and thank you for being gentle with me. I am quite prepared to accept if I am out of line, and I really try hard to be fair.
So many of you have hit the nail right on the head.
knows that is how you react to him...and is therefore taking advantage of it
Yes, absolutely. It had always been like this in the marriage, I am very emotional - probably over emotional, and he is very clinical. Well you can imagine all our disputes fell into the same pattern. Me trying to be calm, him being very logical, me getting upset, him saying 'you are being irrational now', me ending up screaming at him, him feeling he has won because now im being such an hysterical female. Same pattern, same pattern. My mum says he knows me and uses it to his advantage. I think its probably done subconsciously, I cant imagine him doing it on purpose.
I was giving away my power to these particular people
Totally - thats what I do all the time with him, and he seems to know it.
am sure it was a real picnic being married to a man who prides himself on not being emotional
In a nutshell. Why did I never see this before? Ive been feeling guilty for the last 8 years about the marriage break up. I hurt him and I feel bad about that. It was at lest 50% my fault. But it was a bit his fault too.
who was to blame for the break up has absolutely no bearing on access and residency of your daughter. This is entirely about what is best for her. Are you letting guilt over something way in the past affect your interactions with your ex
Yes I am. Absolutely. He has always been more than fair with the maintenance, and it has sort of made me feel I ought to give him as much as he asks for. Its been a big hold on me. Until recently.
does he feel btw that since he is contributing then he has certain rights...has he upped the amount he pays in maintenence recently
I didnt want to raise the money issue myself, because none of this is about money. However at the same time as asking for an extra day he also informed me that he was dropping my maintenance by £300 per month. This is a huge drop that will hurt my pocket quite a lot. This has co-oincided to the month with him buying his house. He clearly needs the money to pay the mortgage. When we first split up he was on £40k a year, so the generous maintenance he paid me was the right amount the CSA would award - although we did it by gentlemans agreement. A few years ago he went self employed, and so he has justified this huge drop in maintenance by telling me he has a nil income. But he would have to be earning half of what I earn to justify the amount he has suggested (I am on the starting salary for a teacher). Even if he was on my wage the CSA would compel him to pay me double the amount he has suggested (confirmed by a solicitor).
Im not going to make an issue of the money - not going to go to the CSA about it, because at the end of the day it has been part of the reason why I havent dared stand up to him. If hes going to pay a derisory amount that leaves me free not to feel bound by guilt. Also I dont want it to look like a 'cash for access' issue.
I would try and get to the bottom of WHY she doesnt want to go, apart from him being strict, is he nice to her generally.
He is not being horrible to her - except in the victorian dad sort of way. Strict, boring, middle class anally retentive. Theres no doubt he loves her. He is just unable to account for her emotional nature - she is emotionally a double of me, and obviously he found me difficult to deal with emotionally.
Shes used to a fluid carry on at my house, play outside until you are tired then eat as you are going upstairs, fall into bed dirty and happy (only thing I am totally consistent about is bedtime). Its not everyones ideal parenting style, I know. But the results are amazing with her (might be disasterous with another child that needed more routine). Shes healthy, happy, intelligent, caring, got the best school review of the class.
Poor dad thinks im bringing her up feral. But strangers have come up to her in restaurants and given her money because she has been so well behaved (my partners jaw nearly hit the ground when it happened). So I stick by my rather unorthodox methods based on the results.
But it does mean she finds it hard going to dads. Hes a typical victorian dad.
confusedjw

I'm rather shocked at some of the replies here.
We've been told that the man never hits or hollars at child or daughter.
He's trying to get his now 8 (or is it 7 or 9) year old daughter to stop sucking her thumb.
At the dinner table he's apparently showing her table manners.
Has an interest in his daughter that compelled him to have her consistanly dispite living a distance away
And some of you are advising Kate to cut him out of their life forever.
Have not any of you seen a child take the lesser path of resistance? Kate admits to being liberal. I too would want my daughter to stop sucking her thumb. Who is the daughter going to shy away from in that case?
Kate, think a lot before taking advice as extreme as you are getting.
Why does he scare you? I don't know, but you've got a little clone in that regard.
katiekitten

I guess I can see what you are saying, but would you make an issue out of the thumb thing to the point where it was making your daughter miserable every time she visited you? Is it really such an important issue, when everything else the child does is exemplary?
He thinks im not bringing her up properly, but as I have already pointed out her manners are impecable, you can take her anywhere and she NEVER causes a fuss or makes a scene, she knows all that stuff about sitting at tables, and not running round. Why make a regular issue about which hand she holds her knife and fork in? I honestly cant understand why anyone would jepardise a relationship over that.
Although it has been suggested to me by many people that I should stop him seeing her, I would never do that. When she was a baby, I used to have to trick him into looking after her. I once went to his Aikido class and handed her over to him, because he had failed to come home the night before and gone straight to Aikido in the morning, (knowing it was his turn to look after her, so sleeping at his mums instead he didnt have to have her). He once forgot to pick her up when it was his weekend, and my child minder had to have her all night, because I had gone out and didnt have my mobile on me.
It only in the last year that there is this sudden interest in parenting her. I cant help thinking if he was so concerned about her thumb and her table manners he wouldnt have left it until she was 7 to try and start enforcing them.
katiekitten

We've been told that the man never hits or hollars at child or daughter.

No, i said he never hit or hollered at me.
I think he smacks her, in that christian way dads do (this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you!)
confusedjw

Kate - I'm not saying he's father of the year by any means, but I've seem many a folk get bad advice and run with it.
Sure I'd try to get her to stop sucking her thumb. The fork and knife thing - well I'm still saying to my kids "eating doesn't have to be that LOUD"
Are these really the issues as to why she doesn't want to go there? Or are they perhaps excuses because he's boring? It's too bad for both of them she's not feeling "Ohhh it's my Daddy!" when he comes to pick her up?
katiekitten

Thank for your input, and dont worry, I would never do anything that was blatantly unfair. Id love her to have a great relationship with her dad.
Yes it really is those things that upset her, because he is just so strict all the time. She has talked to my mum and to my child minder, and its always the same things she mentions that upset her. Its because he makes such a big deal of them - they are not huge issues in themselves.
I re-state her manners are impeccable. Shes not a sloppy eater, or a messy one, or a noisy one. She doesnt shuffle, or get up before she is allowed to, or pick and poke at her food. So why does he have to invent the dinner table sin of having your knife and fork in the wrong hand? I mean, I didnt even know there were rules about this? And trust me this can make you miserable if it happens every meal time.
When I was a kid we had dinner ladies that used to do the same thing to me. I was too young to know I was left handed, so I couldnt explain anything, all I knew was that I was being very naughty (or else why would they be changing my cuttlery round in my hand?) and also that I couldnt eat my meals properly (because I didnt have the strength and technique in my knife hand to cut up food properly. I didnt want to be naughty, but because I couldnt get the food properly I used to have to sneak them back into the 'wrong' hands so I could eat - it made me feel terrible. It made every meal time at school a battle where I knew I was going to be told off.
So this is the issue. Shes knows every time she goes to dads shes going to get told off about something. She says the dog gets her into trouble (because they are training the dog and there are rules about what you can and cant do, and I suppose she breaks the dog rules). She just KNOWS shes going to get into trouble, and it upsets her. Sometimes she comes home and says 'he HATES me' and I have to spend 2 hours telling her how much he loves her while she cries. Its ridiculous, that I have to do his PR for him.
Frannie Banannie

Katiekitten, if it were me and my child's situation, I'd be sure to take her for counseling over this problem, because sure as gawd made little green apples, you're gonna need the input from a psychologist on HER side when he takes you back to court to sue for custody in the future. And he WILL sue for custody, cause that's the "handwriting on the wall" that I'm seeing here.
Frannie
doofdaddy

To confused jehovahs witness
Your comment about the daughter not being happy with visiting her "father" and the father not being happy as well has one basic error.....She is SEVEN years old. He is allegedly an adult.
I am a parent and raised my kids with good manners and was big on teaching them to be healthy individuals but it was done with love and understanding for their age and differing abilities.
As a youth worker I have seen this pattern many times. The father is getting at his ex through the child. His strictness is showing her how sloppy her mother is as a parent.
Until he matures he is ruining his relationship with his daughter, so I believe that a holt on his access may shake him out of his hurt feelings over the breakup of his previous relationship. What does his current partner think of all this?
katiekitten

Thanks Doofdaddy, I often wish I had your kind of courage.
His new wife is a lovely person, but she is about 11 years younger than him, and so is quite in thrall to him. Naturally she supports everything he does. Im not sure, if I was her, id be too happy with his recent comments about how angry he still is at me for being the reason the marriage ended. I think if I had just married someone I wouldnt want to think they still had issues about the previous marriage. it was 8 years ago now. And he was the one that had the affair, I hurt him in other less physical ways.
Oddly, my mum, who has always been pretty mad at me getting divorced, said she doesnt want my daughter to go to her dads. Now I would never go that far. But I feel real guilty every time she has to go to him, because I feel like im watching a brave little person walking away into a difficult situation.
Im sure as she gets older, and is able to stand up to him more and verbalise why certain things upset her, the relationship will improve. Oddly, he was a very rebellious child, and was always clashing with his own dad who was VERY old fashioned in his discipline. But now he is exactly copying his own fathers style. I talked to him about this and said how unfair it was to impose on our daughter the very style he had rebelled against as a child. He said 'we all turn into our parents, the sooner you understand that the better'!
confusedjw

To DoofDaddy,
A youth worker? Is that similar to what we call Social workers here in the states I wonder?
Well for you, or anyone, to look at Kate's original post and give advice to "piss him out of your lives" is ill advised is my opinion. I'm not saying he doesn't have issues, but according to Kate those issues equal 50% of the problems they had.
As a Youth Worker I would imagine advice from you would be more refined. Surely with your training there must be some tools you could offer Kate to manage a situation like this? Surely the father is still a human being with feelings and some other method than disfellowshipping over this matter could be considered? Some attempt by Kate to help him understand the effect on his daughter ought to at least be considered shouldn't it?
Cutting him off is only going to lead to court, fights and worse feelings. I think real courage in this situation is to confront the father with the realities.

What am I so scared of?

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