Just Realized Friend is a HCBM
An old high school friend has been divorced maybe 6 years, and has been on-again/off-again in custody battles for her son. I don't know all the details but i know there has been so much drama at one point she had to have a section of her hair shaved to be tested for drugs (she has been arrested for drugs in the past and i think it was her ex who dropped the dime.)
Today she made this long, emotional Facebook post and tagged her ex, going on about the importance of a close coparenting relationship, and how others should take lessons from her and her ex about putting the kids first ,and gushing about her ex and what a wonderful coparent he is. Talking about how she is so glad rhey have the relationship they do in these trying times. I am off work and bored so i looked through her post history and realized she does this every time she is having a dry spell in her dating life.
She got a lot of likes and supportive comments ("you are such great parents!", "so selfless!"), and at one point in my life i may have done the same. You know, a passing like and comment or something, while thinking "how nice", and kept scrolling. Now, i see it as toxic and i feel for anyone either of them tries to date in the future. Maybe i've become cynical? I see it everywhere now, this child-centric, sacrifice yourself for the little princes/princesses, parent-martyr society, where adult relationships are considered secondary to kids' constant happiness. Where everyone is sort of low-key rooting for the bioparents to get back together. Is this a phase, like the anger phase in the stages of grief?
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I do think you see things
I do think you see things differently once you have been through this experience. I am very quick to be skeptical of people claiming "abuse" or that their ex is a "deadbeat" without having all the facts and both sides of the story. I also can see perpetrators of conflict where others see poor victims more readily.
Yeah, it really does open
Yeah, it really does open your eyes and make you look at things more critically. And false claims make it harder on people who actually do suffer from abuse or parental neglect.
I had a HCBM friend. She was
I had a HCBM friend. She was a coworker, and we brought her into our "steplife is bullsh*t" group, which consisted of myself, a friend whose ex was a drug addict, and a friend who was a SM with a crazy BM.
Anyway, new friend (NF) told a story about how her XH brought in this awful woman who mistreated her kids, and he didn't keep his custody schedule, and he didn't show up to IEP and 504 plan meetings (both kids have a genetic disorder that requires physical assistance), etc. Pretty standard stuff.
Well, the longer we hung out, the more I realized that she made things more complicated than they needed to be. Her kids were teens, but she'd RoFR whenever she'd find out that her XH would go golfing in the mornings when the kids would visit, or when his GF would take all the kids out to do something fun (she had her own kids, too). She was also very mean and toxic in her communication with him, and had a very "my way or the highway" mentality.
Don't get me wrong. He definitely wasn't winning any "Father of the Year" awards, but I could totally see why he avoid any interaction with her. What was the point of going to IEP and 504 meetings if NF was just going to poo-poo his ideas? Why would he go to specialist appointments if he was just going to get chewed out or talked over?
One of the final nails in the coffin for me was when she took a new job that doubled her salary. She wasn't going to tell him her new salary because it would have reduced her CS (and she was bitter that she already got less CS than his first XW that he had kids with). However, when she found out he had gotten a salary bump (not a lot, it was just a COLA), she was PISSED he didn't offer to give her more or take over more of the kids' expenses.
It was a bit nuts. She wasn't super stable in her relationships, and she had some VERY unhealthy boundaries with men she dated. It felt a bit like being friends with a teenager. It made her fun to hang out with from time to time, but the manufactured drama was too much.
You're right. People like
You're right. People like that can be fun to hang out with now and then, but that's about it. I guess, going with the whole "stages of grief" thing, i haven't made it to the "acceptance" phase. People do what they do for various reasons. All we can do is set boundaries so the crazy doesn't affect us.
I had the same realization myself about a friend
Her Facebook post "sometimes the kids don't hate the father because of what the mother is saying, sometimes the kids hate the father cause of the father's actions." Well I called her out on it. I said you absolutely PAS your kid and it's insidious behavior. I talked about how my old mother did that to me and what it did to me. Then sure enough everyone jumped on the bandwagon and agreed with me that she PAS her son against his dad and you aren't supposed to be speak ill of the other parent to the kid. It was awesome. She deleted her post of course
I drifted away from a friend
I drifted away from a friend due to this. She was a lovely woman, kind, insightful... but over time I saw that her stories about her kids' dad didn't add up: she alienated them badly, then blamed him for abandoning them when he finally dropped the rope.
I just stopped responding to her calls to get together, having lost respect for her.