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Deflated Balloons

PlumHalo's picture
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Here's a new one for us. As of late coparenting for my husband and his ex wife has been non existent. And any conversation had with them ends in a dispute. My husband and I are trying to switch over to parallel parenting as we believe that is the only way for the twins to be have a life where their parents aren't in quarrel. The girls' 10th birthday is coming up this month. We usually just have a family birthday party for them, but we wanted to do something special for the girls as they haven't had friends over in forever due to the pandemic. So we offered each girl to invite 2 friends to go to a trampoline park for 2 hours. We asked the girls if they were doing something similar at their mom's house and they said they were going roller skating with 2 friends. So we told the girls to invite different friends then the friends they invited roller skating. All was fine and dandy and we sent them off to school with their invites. Late last night we receive a text from the girls' mom saying she found an invite at the bottom of one if the girl's bags. Assuming it was an invite for the girls she opened it. In her text she expresses her frustration that we should have had the conversation with her that we wanted to have the birthday party with the girls' friends. That she thinks it's silly to invite the same friends to 2 parties and expect different gifts at both parties. She said that since she's the one that has these kind of parties every year that we should have consulted her first on the matter. My husband and I are dumbstruck. Even when their coparenting relationship was good we would have NEVER consulted her first on what kind of BIRTHDAY PARTY we have on our time. We had no idea she "claimed" having the party where they invite friends. We find this vastly inappropriate on so many levels. One with the girls' privacy, and second in trying to scold us for doing something fun for the girls, and third she went straight to us with her assumptions instead of first asking the girls about it. We told her to stop trying to tell us what to do on our time. So she responded calling us "single minded" in thinking this kind of thing doesn't effect the girls. How do we handle this? Should we be looking at it from another angle or is this just another example of HC parent and something we need to ignore going forward? 

tog redux's picture

Just High Conflict, territorial crap. She wants to play MOTY at birthday parties. Just tell her you will make decisions about what happens at your home and then don't respond further. 

CastleJJ's picture

Nope, this is just HCBM drama. A lot of kids now a days live between 2 households and it's completely normal for each parent to have a birthday party. DH and our BM have been doing this for years, and guess what, the same friends are at both birthdays. Typically, they just bring skids 2 smaller gifts (1 at each party) instead of 1 bigger gift. I don't see any problem with what you guys did. Don't let BM rain on your parade. Your email response was perfect, now proceed as planned.

weightedworld's picture

I have a large family and we have always done family birthdays as there are a total of 10 sibs/cousins thats plenty of fun play time. With their dad he has no family here and so he generally takes the role of doing the friend thing for the birthday party and that has worked with us for a few years now. That seems fair enough. This last year I even helped getting the invites to where they needed to go because we are not able to pass out invites at school. 

I am totally fine with it as than I don't have to deal with a bunch of kiddos and their antics Smile haha 

Most days we don't like each other and I am thankful in some situations we are able to put our beef aside for the greater good. 

Rags's picture

No more witten anything in the twin's packs.  

All invitations go out by email or phone call.  If she is so toxic as to pull this crap, go to war, win it, and shred this POS BM.

Protect the girls from her.

She makes me sick.

NoWireCoatHangarsEVER's picture

Brief, informative , friendly and firm. Keep giving the same response no matter her follow up response . You are going to parent how you want to parent in your time basically over and over and over again. She is always going to try and get you worked up and sucked into the drAma but don't and eventually she is got to go and find narcissistic supply that she matters somewhere else