I (30f) have two children (11 and 8) with my ex. He’s now married and he has a 3 year old… maybe a 2 year old. I forget the age of his third child but he has a child with his wife. For the last two and a half years I’ve had custody of our kids.
This came after a lot of fucked up behavior toward our kids. Including telling our kids I had died and even recording them sobbing, leaving them with a friend of his who was high and had drugs all around them and trying to force food into our younger child’s mouth.
He has no visitation with our kids. There been 5 court appearances since he lost custody and we had to meet with a child advocate three times in the time since I was awarded sole custody.
His wife is not someone I know. In the six years they were together we spoke twice. The first time was before he lost custody and she accused me of trying to ruin their wedding by making him work excessively long hours to pay an unreasonable amount of child support when they were trying to get married.
The second time was after one of our meetings with the child advocate and she blamed me for him not being much of a husband to her or father to their kid because he was trying sooo hard to get his custody time back. She didn’t outright say he was a lazy father but I would guess it’s more of that than he’s doing what he can to get visitation with them at least.
So I never expected to hear from this woman. But last week, last Tuesday actually, I was home because my kids had no school and she called me at 8:30 saying she was going for a small procedure and needed someone to watch her child until 4pm or 5pm. She told me she had nobody else and it would be good for the kids to have some kind of contact. I told her no and I ended the call. She called me back but I didn’t answer.
Wednesday, Friday and Saturday I received several texts from her asking what kind of mom I am and telling her I should be ashamed of myself for not helping in an emergency and denying the kids a chance to see each other.
I don’t feel bad about it but I know this child is half sibling to my children so I acknowledge there might be some wrong on my part for not helping. Maybe. AITA?