About Terri Matheis Expertise I founded a nationwide social group for divorced & separated women in 2004. The group`s name is Sassy Pink Peppers and our motto is "Laugh, Dance, Move On!" I can answer any question with regards to divorce, starting over, and moving on to a more positive life.
Experience I have been divorced twice, with one remarriage in between, and started a nationwide social group for divorced & separated women in 2004. The group's name is Sassy Pink Peppers and our motto is "Laugh, Dance, Move On!".
Divorce Issues - Life wasn't meant to be a nasty threesome
Expert: Terri Matheis - 10/5/2009
Question I moved in with my now Fiancé about 4.5 years ago. He had been separated for about 5 years at that point and they shared a boy who was 6 ½ years old. I very slowly incorporated myself into more of a stepmother role. I believe in the practice of “it takes a village” for child rearing and was raised that way with my own very large family. This practice was readily embraced by my fiancé.
We have a couple of problems, first of all, the obvious… They still aren’t divorced. The following issues might help explain this, he is the son of a narcissistic mother who unfortunately let her own ambitious take priority to her nurturing (e.g. she locked him in his room as a toddler, among other lacking things people/men need to be taught to be a functional person). His father was/is an alcoholic. From reading about this ailment it’s my understanding that the alcohol is more the vice and not the problem, That problem being the way one handles situations… lack of accountability/responsibility, shifting of blame/scapegoat etc. In essence, my Fiancé has been taught some pretty nasty things in life and he has his own list of issues that I’ve been digging at and have now put forth with our counselor (who concurs). He’s just now starting to deal with the anxiety, passive aggressiveness and a resulting fear of confrontation.
I can’t speak much for the mother but from all indications she seems to be insecure (some of which I can recognize since there is another woman helping to raise her son) but most of the time it’s very irrational and she overly asserts herself upon our lives in ways which I can only see as controlling (which I believe to be a by product of insecurity). I have a very hard time trying to get my Fiancé to see the realities of her actions due to his huge comfort zone of denial, anxiety and fear to confront her. This has taken its toll in our relationship, but even more importantly on the child who is now 11. She does not control her emotions and regularly disparages him and myself in front of the boy, weather directly or with her friends and even calls up my Fiancé on the phone with the boy in the car to rip him a new one (usually for petty reasons, not that there are good reasons to have your child involved).
Here’s the real clincher, they work at the same location. Different floor but she somehow manages to catch him at the doors coming in and going out and on coffee runs to his floor. These look far too strategic for me to see it as coincidence. She inserts herself upon him at the time. Usually this begins with casual almost benign covers… i.e. drops off his baseball gear bag (even tough I’ve asked him to get duplicates of anything that the boy might need to have passed from parent to parent in hope to reduce these seemingly well placed encounters). But constantly I’ve been told of other things that’s she’s shot across the bow which causes much strife with him and us. The most recent was that she stated “I know she (me) tells you not to answer the phone when I call. I already know the answer, you don’t have to respond”. And then she instructed him to “Answer my calls”.
She’s lurked around him when he had an office and now that he’s at a cube and eavesdrops our phone conversations, reads his computer monitor before announcing her presence. A year ago coworker suggested that my Fiancé write her an email and ask all correspondence be written to help calm down the hostilities. He did this and after about 10-14 days she starts slithering back to her old ways. He’s since written a total of about 7 of these request. She refuses to responds or initiate in a written form and insist on live contact with him and each time is at his office where I am sure not to be an influence on him.
His combination of passive-aggressiveness, anxiety and fear of confrontations causes other issues in our life whereby I have had to get into heated conversations with him, draw graphs and make spreadsheets in order to try to get him to do the things in which he needs to do to simply keep us from living in a box. Due to her lurking of him at his work place, she has inserted herself the belief that I treat him badly, browbeat etc. Of course she doesn’t use her own memory of who he was when he was with her to remember that there’s another side to anything. After eavesdropping she’s made comments to him to try to place doubt in our relationship and me. Now, here’s the kicker… this woman cheated on my Fiancé with a heroin addict when their son was a toddler. She came home with hickies on her neck and no remorse. Yet here she is in my mind showing the same lack of boundaries towards him by eavesdropping and cornering him at work after he’s asked her not to do so. When he first left her he did want her back, he moved to the east coast for a job offer and even helped get her a job with the same contract company (initially they didn’t work at the same location). It’s clear to all of us that she doesn’t want him back. I feel this is more of a long standing co-dependant issue with her and her crazy need to not have him in her house but an inability to let him live his life, more or less parent in his home without her assertions. Earlier this year she coerced him into abandoning his son for some 6 months. She had overhead a heated conversation we had where I was trying to get him to do the things necessary to thwart foreclosure and this was all very scary for him. She did not know the topic, nor do I think she cared. She played on him that he looked sad and beaten down by me and told him that she didn’t want her son around that (as if he was around during our call at his office, not) so she told him he’s not coming over to our house until he basically dumps me. She convinced herself that she was protecting her son and emotionally blackmailed him for the next few months with threats to suit him for divorce and sole custody. Meanwhile the boy was confused and hurt that he wasn’t allowed his normal 50% time with his father. She wouldn’t even allow him to spend the night on his father’s birthday and after the boy got off of the phone to her whereby he asked this, his response to me was “my mom is forcing me to go back to her house”. She was telling the boy that the reason was because his father wasn’t getting him to school on time, but yet I was barred through these threats of suing for sole custody from any interaction with the boy. School events, recitals, cub scouts and even baseball which I had been the primary person with him on. At one point when I did see the boy I asked him how was everything and he disclosed that his mother said to him “If you had to choose between living with your father and Valli and never seeing me, or living with me and occasionally seeing your father, which would you choose”, he then went on to say “I chose the later because I wanted to see both of them” I just hugged him and told him that he was loved.
In my opinion she’s performing parental alienation, custodial interference and some insane controlling issues with her codependency problems. Our counselor has just been wishy-washy and frankly I’m feeling like I’m the only sane person. Please, I’d love your opinion. I fear for the child and on top of all this, she even has one of my Fiancé’s sisters convinced that “she is the warrior protecting the child’s innocence”. Crazyland!
Answer The problem as I see it is that you are a take-charge type of person and your fiance is passive. It sounds like no matter how much you try to take control of the situation, he is unwilling to cooperate. And so you become the angry one. And he becomes more passive.
It is a vicious cycle and one in which there are no winners. The more you tell him what to do, the more that he will resist, and he will sabotage you rather than confront you.
Stop spending so much energy on how things should be handled between the two of them. Start concentrating on getting in touch with your own feelings and why it matters so much to you. What in your past is provoking such emotional attachment to the situation.
