Sensitive Topic
This is a new account for obvious reasons. This is not something I discuss under my main account and don’t wish to have connected to it.
I am a woman in my mid 30s married to a man, 40, for 10 years. We have been together for 14 years. He has 2 daughters who are now 16 and 18 and a son who is 20. All with his ex wife. We have a 12 year old daughter together.
He left his ex when the kids were 5, 3 and 1 but they didn’t officially divorce until 3 years later. Yes we were already living together when he finally got divorced. It took as long as it did because his ex fought it every step of the way because she had a very hard time accepting that it was truly over.
For most of the last 14 years, his kids have been with us every other weekend during the school year and every other week in the summer except when his ex was having issues - there were several instances where they lived with us full time for a matter of months. But recently things have changed.
His ex ended her own life last October. She never completely recovered from the end of their marriage. She had been dealing with depression and alcohol abuse issues off and on since he left her. She had placed the blame for her problems squarely on my shoulders. Even until the end she was convinced that had I not been in the picture, they would have been able to put their family back together.
I was not the other woman. I did not know him when he and his wife were together. They were separated when we met and started dating. He had no interest in being with her or fixing their marriage and he had made that very clear. He would not have reconciled with her regardless of whether he and I had never met. That relationship was over. He did not love her and he did not want to be with her.
But of course the kids now blame me for the death of their mother. Because of her words leading up to her death, they are firmly convinced that if I had just gone away their father and mother could have been together and she would not have died. He has tried to explain to them that she had emotional and mental health issues long before they were even born and that those were not caused by the end of the marriage. But of course they don’t believe him. But they don’t hate him for it. They hate me for it.
As of right now, they actually stay most of the time with his ex wife’s parents even though they are supposed to be full time here. They won’t live here as long as I am here. They do see their father. He takes them out to dinner often, visits them at their grandparents several evenings a week and has done a couple of weekends away with them over the summer so far and has a 2 week vacation in August. He plans to take them camping for a week then he is going to come back and he and I and our daughter are going to a different campground together because he feels like she has been a bit neglected through all of this.
Obviously, this isn’t sustainable. Something has to change. He can’t keep living two entirely separate lives. It’s killing him. We see him maybe 2 days a week. If we are lucky. I get it that they are going through a difficult time and I am trying to be understanding but this can’t go on indefinitely. He wants them to come home and live here and to move forward as a family. But they are so against living with me and being around me and blame me for their mother’s death.
I’m just at a loss where to go from here. I don’t want to force the issue. I know they are hurting. But it is so hard to be blamed for something that was not my fault. I just don’t know what to do. I just know that living this way is not sustainable and I’m not leaving my husband or my home to make them happy. That’s one step too far.