Therapy time?
Does anyone know a good family therapist? Someone willing to tackle sweeping dysfunction and complex constitutional family dynamics?
Let me tell you a bit about this family. Mom has full custody of the kids. She made ‘em, and the courts are clear that she has sole custody.
Dad’s a distant figure. He lives in Ottawa and when he comes to visit, it’s only for a few hours.
Mom and Dad have had a rocky relationship from the beginning. Since 2015, they’ve been going through a really bad patch. They can barely stand to be in a room together.
When Dad comes to town, he doesn’t want to hang out with Mom, so he just visits the kids. And, like so many distant Dads, he tries to buy their affection. An LRT line here, a housing grant there, and so it goes.
Mom can’t stand the sight of Dad, and so the pictures of him doling out goodies to the kids — HER kids — makes her furious. And she’s none too pleased about the life choices some of those kids have made, either. Bike lanes! Electric busses! Unrestricted zoning! She cut their allowance in 2019 to try to scare them straight, but the wokeism isn’t going away.
Today, she’s decided to use her custody order to stop Dad’s nonsense for once and for all. If he comes to town with gifts, the kids can’t accept them without her explicit say-so. That’ll show them!
Readers, this family needs an intervention. Months, if not years, of therapy: “I feel disrespected when you use your spending power in my areas of jurisdiction.” “I feel hurt that you never said thank-you for that pipeline I bought you.”
So if you know of someone up to the challenge…
And on the flipside, perhaps dad has been giving mom money all along to buy things for the kids, which she has not done. So when dad comes to town, he buys some things for the kids that mom should’ve bought from the child support payments and other monies to support the kids. As in real life domestic situations, Dads are often painted as the bad guys… when Moms are not always squeaky clean either.
Mom needs to stop seeing everything Dad does as a threat to her being the Mom. And Dad needs to stop buying the kids gifts without first talking it over with Mom (esp. gifts where Mom gets stuck with additional expenses and costs to maintain the gift). They both need to get over themselves and learn to be able to be in the same room and talk reasonably about what's best for the kids. Mom needs to recognize that Dad's gifts can really help the kids, if they're well chosen and appropriate. Dad needs to recognize that, despite him being richer than Mom, that dropping a bunch of gifts with no notice or thought can be really disruptive to plans that Mom and the kids may have made. It's a very old story -- they need to learn to communicate if they're going to co-parent.