Ughh - both of our exes are kicking off at once.

Mine

Mine is going back on an agreement we made to divide property, the agreement isn't legally binding, so he can. I replied to his "oh btw, I don't agree anymore" email on Monday and heard nothing since. He's just basically being awkward and rigid. But I've done a lot of work, without any help from him at all to get the house market ready and as soon as it is, he pulls this. It makes my blood boil because of a lot of the remedying I had to do on the house was down to damage he'd caused directly or indirectly (as well as general wear and tear which isn't specifically him or me)

He made me switch nights with him so my son could watch England in the World Cup - as he refused to help him watch the match. I had offered to take our son to the pub after his new school's orientation evening and bring him back, I offered for him to join us. I wasn't sure I would be able to take our son overnight as it's not my normal night and I thought I'd have to go to work really early the next day and my son needed to be taken to his new school for an orientation day and I wouldn't have had time to do both. As it happened, I didn't need to do the work travel so I swapped the whole night. 

My ex didn't even show up to the school orientation. My most major worry is that he completely abdicates his responsibility around schooling. He expects achievement, but does nothing to support it. Not even showing up to the parent evening was a bad sign.

His

My partner only has his kids EOWE and half the holdays. They live over two hours away by car, so usually he drives to pick them up on Friday after school and brings them back on Sunday evenings. 

So she's been scheduling a lot of kid activities on his (court ordered) time, for example, she signed YSS up for a climbing competition this weekend and said it was a morning competition. She expected SO to give up his Friday night (there's no swapsies with them) and then the plan was to bring them back down to where we live on Saturday afternoon after the competition. Then OSS says there's an event he wants to go to on Saturday afternoon and then last night she says climbing competition might go on until 6pm if YSS does well. OK that's annoying. But YSS LOVES to climb and we are assuming it was a one-off competition and that's not something he'd want to miss. However, she should have asked him if it was ok before she signed him up for it. 

But that's not all. She says he needs to spend the night camping near their little village because even though OSS talked to his dad just last night and said he wanted to come down to where we live afterwards, he had only said that because "he thought that's what you wanted to hear and he didn't want to hurt your feelings. The kids are afraid that if they hurt your feelings that you won't love them anymore."

She wants my partner to spend the night in HER orbit. She's has been pushing for him to come and spend weekends in the village at HER house - though she has said she will go elsewhere. 

Then she wrote "they need to feel that you want to spend time with them and no-one else. They need to feel like they are enough for you."  

Whaaaaaa? 

She has been pressing for my partner to spend these stupid half weekends with his kids up with her in the village for a little while - basically for the past couple of months after she started complaining that OSS was talking too much about how things were so good at our house and that this was causing problems and that they (she and my SO) needed to provide a 'united front' on this. Now she's implying that them spending time around me and my son is causing OSS mental distress and makes him feel like he's not enough for his dad Apparently she was making OSS sit there while she typed out this letter. I'm not sure why she thinks OSS is lying to dad to spare his feelings but not just going along with her to avoid her rages. (She's had to be banned by the court from being at kid's schools at Friday handover because on several occasions she swore at my partner in front of their kids and other kids and parents and even kicked his car while the kids were in it in front of other people. She makes OSS bring her cups of tea in bed up two flights of stairs at the weekend and recently threw two mugs of tea across the room because he'd asked why YSS never had to do it.)

Actually OSS and my BS are huge buddies, hang out together really well, etc. It is true that they were spending so much time together that sometimes we didn't see them except for planned activities and meal times, so we have created space for my partner to spend some alone time with each of his kids.

MY SO does as much as he can to be flexible and takes on board what she says. But there's a limit. I FEEL like she's threatened by me and our home life. She does everything she can to make sure that they don't have a social life down here and disrupts my SO's time with them as much as possible.  My SO is not a confrontational guy and he's still scarred by her raging and tantrums during the marriage. He's a wreck right now, he knows there's going to be a massive showdown on Saturday. It's awful.