My ex won’t stop talking about me to our daughter.
Tonight my ex-husband was on the phone with our 17-year-old daughter and overheard me getting upset with her about not putting the house keys back. There was no name-calling or anything abusive, but I was definitely frustrated. I am constantly the only person in this house who puts the keys back on the key holder by the front door, and it regularly leads to me searching for car keys or mailbox keys when I’m already in a rush. There have even been times I’ve ended up late because no one puts them where they belong, despite me asking over and over again.
Today I finally hit a breaking point. I had a friend waiting on me for an appointment, and once again, the keys were nowhere to be found. After calling my husband, he told me our daughter had been the last person to use them, so I yelled asking where she had put them and why nobody besides me ever puts the keys back where they belong. She told me she hadn’t used them in a few days and hadn’t seen them. I eventually found them buried underneath art supplies in the dining room.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that her father was on the phone listening. Later, my daughter told me he responded by saying, “Dang, I would never act like that over something so small. It’s really not that deep. She needs to take a chill pill. I see she’s still the same.” My daughter, who knows how he can be, responded by saying she understood why I was upset because I was in a rush and couldn’t find the keys. After that, he stayed quiet.
This is the first time in years he has overheard me genuinely upset. The hard part is that he has a long history of taking moments where I react emotionally usually after being pushed or provoked for long periods of time and turning them into proof that I’m somehow irrational or unstable. My daughter is aware of how he is for the most part, but it still hurts.
I’ve spent years trying to be cordial and maintain a healthy co-parenting relationship with him. I never withheld our daughter from him, even when I could have made things much harder. I didn’t pursue the maximum child support, even though he pays less than he technically should. He has always had open access to our daughter, and when he comes to pick her up during school breaks, he has even stayed in our home because we live far apart.
Meanwhile, my daughter comes home from visits telling me the awful things he says about me behind my back. I’ve known for years, but I’ve stayed silent because I don’t want to betray her trust or put her in the middle. Still, it’s exhausting being kind and welcoming to someone who later trashes me to our child.
Tonight hit especially hard because I was genuinely overwhelmed and frustrated, and I’m tired of constantly taking the high road while being criticized behind the scenes. My husband is now at the point where he no longer wants my ex staying in our home because he sees the emotional toll it has taken on me over the years.
I feel lost. Part of me wants to confront him, but I already know how it usually goes he deflects, denies, twists things around, or somehow makes me the problem. I honestly don’t know what the right thing to do is anymore.