I keep remembering that line from the movies JAWS2: "just when you thought it was safe to go back into the water...", well, that's kind of what I feel like is happening to me in my real-life version of the movie. It would be nice to have a day or two to recover from the emotional assaults that seem to be coming at me on a daily basis, but it seems like whenever there is a momentary lull - and I mean momentary - just a matter of a few hours, I get pelted again by some new zinger without any recovery time in between zaps. It's really wearing me down.

Case in point: the soon-to-be-ex is in Europe working (he is finally working, and has complained to the children that their evil mother and her attorney have forced him to take a job after 4 1/2 years of loafing - poor him) and he called my boys yesterday to tell them that he purchased courtside seats for them at a local basketball game for this evening. Yes - he is not even in the country and is extending his long arm from overseas to manipulate the home situation. Mind you, he didn't email me or call me to run this by me first and make sure it would be okay - what if they had tests the next day, or homework due? After all I am only the children's mother and guardian and legally responsible for them, and the children are not even on his parenting time. Instead he is once again playing Disneyland dad and bribing them. He arranged for his brother Their uncle)to go with my kids to the game, without so much as running it by me first. He had their cousin call them to make transportation arrangements, and sidestepped me entirely. He has put the children once again in the awful position of being the messengers or go-betweens between their parents, something that I was always advised never to do to them. Yet, here they are, in exactly that position. What a coward he is, delegating to his sons so he won't have to confront me.

Well after I swallowed hard and blinked back my tears, I told my boys that if they want to go to the game with their uncle it would be all right with me. But that they should go if and only if they really want to see the game, and not because - as my eldest put it - dad obviously spent a few hundred dollars on these tickets and he would feel guilty letting them go to waste. Am I resentful? You bet I am. And on several levels. First of all, because he sidestepped me and went over my head, showing total disregard for both the law, the children's emotional well-being, and my authority as their guardian and their mother. Secondly, I cannot afford to take my children out for ice cream, and here is their dad - who is fighting spousal and child support, offering me 3 years of support after 20 years of marriage, is refusing to reimburse me for the joint household and parenting expenses incurred since he left me, but he is willing to spend hundreds of dollars on tickets to see a basketball game, without even being there to take them himself. Talk about a sphere of influence.

Then, to add insult to injury, later on that evening after I thought I had handled the sleazy situation admirably without bad-mouthing their dad, I find out that the soon-to-be-ex has also sweet-talked his way into convincing our son to scrap the plans we had made through our attorneys to each take our son to visit a few of the colleges he was interested in applying to in the fall, and that he has now rearranged things so that he will be taking our son to all of them himself. It appears that I have been dumped without even being consulted.I am especially hurt that my son went right along with it. He knows that his father has lied, cheated, carried on with another woman, and yet he still loves and wants to be with the man. Mind-boggling.

All of these goings on have now caused a rift between my boys, as the youngest is appalled by this ongoing manipulation, sees my tears and feels compelled to protect me from his father and his now insensitive older brother as well. He is my self-appointed protector, and while deep down inside my heart I am grateful for his loyalty, I really do not think that this is a good thing for him. No matter how hard I try to convince him that I am okay and capable of taking care of myself and handling the situation, he is not swayed. Since my oldest has once again been bamboozled by his dad and has understandably succumbed to his need for daddy's attention after a lifetime of being ignored, my youngest now feels responsible for being supportive of me.

I am tired of all of this cloak and dagger stuff, and am at the point where I am just about ready to hand over either or both of the kids to their father, if this is what they think they want at this point in their lives. If I have not succeeded in instilling in them the moral and ethical values we have lived by during their seventeen years of life on this planet, then I'm not sure how much more I can do at this late stage of the game. Maybe, like so many other mothers who have gone through this and shared their stories with me, maybe the kids just need to go live with him, and figure things out for themselves. In almost all of the stories I've heard, once the bloom was off the rose and the true non-disneylanddad lifesyle resumed in their fathers' households the kids eagerly ran back to their moms, having realized that they had been bribed emotionally and materially and wanted to go back to the security of living with a parent who actually placed limitations on their behavior and established rules for the house. Unfortunately that often happened after spending a couple of years in the other household: not days or even weeks. In the meantime, their poor moms walk around feeling like they has been eviscerated, and they assume the look of a deer caught in the headlights. You know, that hollow shocked look with dark circles around the eyes, like something out of night of the living dead.

I just don't know how much more of this I can take. Like Tevye says in Fiddler on the Roof: If I bend too far I will break. I already hear the branches creaking, my friends...I don't know the best way to deal with this anymore, and I'm afraid.


Foundhervoice-atlast