hello

thanks Sparkling & Louise I am glad you told me what you thought, I did want your opinions because I wasn't that sure myself, I think I had already come to that conclusion. It is not worth the risk & apart from anything else why should I share my holiday with him after what he has done! he needs to work out his own way of seeing the kids & also once we had said what needed saying & sorting out I would be feeling back at square one again & would be upset, & the last thing I would need would be to have him with me BUT NOT with me! What was I thinking :shock:

Sy, hope you have a nice day off today.
Paula

My daughter seems to be a bit brighter today, thanks. I think she is if I can keep her occupied.

I've just left my youngest with the friend who'll be moving. Seems there is swine flu all over the place now - with a dozen other bugs going around. It can't be avoided anyway. Just if I can criticise The Git, I will 8-) He's never looked after them when they've been ill - if they were with him I'd have to go and collect them.

My head hurts!

Talked with CSA, and they neglect to mention couple of concessions that are available to me last night. Bill is slightly less. I feel a little better. I'm not ready for repossession yet.

Theeeeen, postman come with brown letter.

Our tax long-term tax credit overpayment arrangement of not getting any credits as repayment method has ended. I found out possibly due to Louise making another single person claim. Now they want the whole joint debt in 3 weeks time. We are jointly liable. If Louise not pay 50%, they will come for me for her half! I text Louise to be more careful.

£3,709 is the total.

That's it, "when the going gets tough, sy..........meets his mum for tea and cake in shopping mall". ;)

sy (with headache)

My ex did that with me, although ours was only £370. He told me he would pay and I forgot about it. Next thing, he defaulted having not paid any and they came after me.

You can negotiate a repayment plan, although it does need to be paid back within a certain time period.

Don't blame you for meeting your mum - and I hope you enjoyed the tea and cake. It means it gives you time to absorb this bit in and get over the shock...

you have all been busy today!! Have I missed Anna now? hope she has a lovely time.

Swine flu IS everywhere now, we know loads of people here that have had it, I think my daughter & my Mum had it about 4 wks ago now. The Dr surgery were not bothered though, did not even offer the meds for it. Most people we know have really not been that ill with it.

thank you for your lovely words in your posts. I am feeling better than I did but I think alot of that is to do with the anger kicking in. I have not had any more texts except to simply ask me to give the kids a kiss from him, which of course I did.

Hope you work something out ok with the money Sy & thanks for the car link, I am ahead though I already belong to it. Still a heap of s**t of a car though no matter how much help there is on it & IT HAS TO GO!

I must take a look at your DIY section Sy, I may actually learn something & have a go.
I nearly died of fear today though, really needed someone brave, I had to pick up a dead RAT :o from the garden. we have had pest control in as we have a problem out there so I am going to be finding dead rats everywhere AHHHHHHHH!!!!!
It took me ages to pick it up I hate touching dead things, BUT RATS!

Have to have a good clean of house again tomorrow. kids will have to make their own entertainment.

Have nice weekend everyone.
Paula

No sy, you're not turning into The Git! He always cancelled seeing the children, if you recall...

I know my posts are a bit direct with you at times though, and I didn't reply last night as I was too tired to answer it carefully...

Paulasgems is so right. Don't text. I used to send really angry texts - he never got to see how upset the children were, and would use such stupid phrases to justify his actions.

Moving to word and will paste it after! If the page starts bouncing I think I'll get a headache! :D

I do think you realised that it was a bit tit-for-tat. Like I say, I did it, so can’t blame you at all!!

I do think you need to be prepared for the Court to award every other weekend as Contact. It could take a while to sort though. I think the distance involved would possibly exclude one evening each week.

Every night telephone contact is pretty good – especially as you know that this is included in your telephone contract.

Paulasgems also makes the point that the children will in time see that the ‘other’ parent (terrible way of putting it, I know) chose someone else over them.

My eldest only asked me last year why I didn’t ask dad to stop contact with the Texan. (The real life “friends”, I could cope with) When I told him I did, he was shocked. He asked when I last asked him, and when I said the night before we left, he cried. My son was 16 when he asked this, and we’d left four years before. I think by then he was ready to hear my side. I think the ex has told them so much to put me in a bad light. Not hearing from people I thought were good friends shows he did discuss me in a bad light with them.

The Texan had been on the scene for two and a half years by then. I had asked The Git to stop contacting her, but he wouldn’t. He did agree though to her stopping contact with the children and I did tell the children they weren’t to be in contact with her – as she was only on the internet, I could not be certain of her gender or her agenda with the children.

I too assure them their father loves them, but have told them that their dad has chosen this new life and is busy, and will see them when he can. I do want them to raise their eyes to the sky and think ‘oh no, I can’t stand him and I don’t want to see him’, but they don’t. They think he’s wonderful, which is right really…

And what I say is thinking how my children reacted to things. It was awful pressure on them, and after we’d been apart for coming up to two years, my daughter, then 12 got to the point when a text came through she was shaking. She was at a point of a breakdown.

The pressure on our children can be immense, as we don’t always think of them. The two people they love most in the world living apart. God, how awful that must be for them. Torn loyalties, needing to ‘prove’ to both parents that they love them.

More info about me and my family now… Cup of tea time! It’s getting longer by the minute. I file it away in my head, and then when I think about it, it’s hard to stop typing.

My now 10 year old was 6 when we were declared homeless. He started to soil himself. Stopped when we were housed. Started up again a month or so later, and always before they saw their father. The same issues were affecting him as were affecting my daughter. It took the courage of the older two to tell me what was going on and I acted on it. The Git blames me completely for this, and took to yelling at me in front of my neighbours. He had never shouted at me before until I asked for the divorce. He always did as he chose and I funded it! He didn’t deal well with the loss of control. I didn’t even realise how controlled I had been until I was volunteering with a supportive housing group – who helped me when I was homeless.

Ex will never see him as having done anything wrong. However, by criticising me with the children and telling the children how to behave (when they were with him, they were not allowed to contact me at all – which I accepted, but which greatly upset my eldest boy). When he lived within a 5 minute walking distance, they were not allowed to call in either.

Then I blew things big time. With the second fiancé (he’s married the third) in the October he cancelled all overnight contact time, except for one – the first in December. A group of friends rearranged a Christmas dinner for that night so I could go out with them – me going out is extremely rare! The children came home from the Tuesday evening visit all excited as fiancé was coming “but we can’t sleep there as her sons are coming too”. I phoned him and asked what he thought he was playing at. I yelled, and even though I closed the bedroom door, the children heard.. No spare beds he said. My daughter was gutted. She said that dad didn’t care and put everyone ahead of them.

Worse than that, my youngest started to soil himself again, and when under stress, still does. School nurse involved, GP doesn’t particularly care. I’ll never ever forgive myself for getting angry.

That was back in 2006. I have accepted everything he has said since then. It was just too much for the children to cope with.

This is why I ask you not to talk things through with Luke. You can ‘roughly’ answer questions truthfully. You can let him know how much you love him and Arwen, and how they are your world. You can let him know how much you miss them and how sad you have found it that they don’t live with you. You can let them know how much you look forward to seeing them and how you can’t wait for that time to come.

But don’t blame any of this on Louise. You don’t actually need to mention her at all. They can’t cope with it. I don’t mention The Git to the children (I’m quite certain they don’t know I call him that. I do always refer to him as dad if I speak about him).

No one actually suggested ways of dealing with the children.

It was doing two courses with this housing group that made me realise I was as abusive to the children as I felt he was. One was domestic abuse – made me realise that I had actually been a victim, and actually helped me stop blaming myself quite so much for things. Especially the money side of things, as ex always wanted me to give him more and more money – hence the silly hours I worked. Yet he would turn round and say I never spent time with him – I was working – nights and evenings too with admin work. I couldn’t work much during the day as I had the children. He was earning £34k at that point, I was earning £11k.

The other course I did was child abuse. My goodness what a sad course that is to do. Made me aware that every adult has a moral responsibility to every child though – whether the child is there’s or not. This made me question why the children’s god-parents never approached me to question the well-being of the children… I did ask though about my situation, and how I felt I needed to correct things with the children – although a lot the school did for me, especially with the extreme religious view points. As even then I realised that I didn’t want to be seen in conflict with the other parent.

Being in conflict with the other parent – and telling a child/ren that the other parent did this or that, or shouldn’t be doing this or that – is abuse. I’d been abusing my children, when I thought I’d been clearing things up for them. A third party can clear things up for them eg, school, but the other parent can’t.

That’s why I feel you do need to be easier on Luke. As he does have special needs too, things are more factual in his head and so not so easy to explain.

I’ll never forget the look in my son’s eyes, the one with special needs, the night we had left what was our home due to homelessness. He was on an airbed on a friend’s floor. The look of bewilderment in his eyes broke my heart – and makes me cry now thinking of it. I’ll never forget that. He can only deal with facts. It didn’t matter how I explained, he only knew that we’d given the key back to the Landlord.

Sorry it’s long sy.

It’s lack of food. This Slim fast lark is killing me, I think! I hardly ate yesterday, and so I’m not in the best of moods with the children today. Far better if I type here quietly! A good counselling session for me.

Sy - isn't it by Friday they need the paperwork in?

Excel is marvelous for things like this.

Really important to sort that out.

With contact, if you are able to write down how you would like contact to be and why then that could be something you can discuss with Cafcass. You can also state that you're concerned about schooling and the fact that children were removed from school without your consent or knowledge.

Same with contact with Arwen, point out you have never noticed her to by unhappy in your company, and that maybe its beneficial and not seen as favouritism having them both together...

You could perhaps do a more 'emotional' summing up at the end.

I've written to a local agency that Working Links said could help me last year, and then decided they could. Seeing Working Links have been less than helpful, I've written direct instead.

My son's provisional licence has come through, so I've told him he's having lessons with the chap who has said he'll consider tutoring me! I can talk things through with him then, and find out how much he does want and how he needs paying. If I can pay as I go along, I might be able to do it without a loan. If he needs paying up front, then I'll have to think long and hard.

At the moment, I'm struggling with the debt I do have, and with extra expense of children at home, I'm really struggling!! I can pay my bills and we can eat so we're ok... Just that fear of yet another loan.

The only reason my son can have lessons is because I put some money away after I got my inheritance. Only a few hundred, but there's a bit there. He owes me some, so that can go into youngest's account - as he was born a while after my parents' home had been sold.

If ex got a whiff of this money he could demand it though, as it goes back to when we were married. I'd actually forgotten about the building society books and came across them looking for my son's birth certificate. Such a relief, I cried. He's desperate to learn to drive!

Franchise won't work. They don't like it if you leave even though you're allegedly self-employed! Almost £200 a week for the franchise, and if they refer students to you, then they have a percentage of the lesson.

I couldn't imagine having to find that much money a week before making an income, especially working part time.

Yep. Just need the confidence to phone the bloke.

Strangely enough, advert in the local paper for that agency I was talking about...

I've got my business plan ready :D

I know the rates I'll charge, and I even have a couple of friends waiting for me to pass - no pressure then! I still need to be able to sit in a car though - and get out of it...

You done that working tax thing yet? 8-)