Charlie has arranged for children to do skype in the evening with her family as it’s parents 50th. She seems a bit edgy beforehand, but I’m not sure why. The children are settled and we are all ready in time.
Charlie starts the call, I stay away because Charlie constantly rejects my family and it doesn’t feel appropriate to pretend to her family that everything is OK. Charlie does not let the children talk to their cousins and Grandma on my side. After an hour, Charlie comes and insists that I come and say hello on the skype, I don’t want to argue so I go along with it and say hello to her family. It’s clear that they no nothing about the difficulties in our relationship.
After that, Ollie says he wants to sleep outside in the swag so I hang around outside with him and he’s chatting about the stars. He really wants to see a shooting star. Then he changes his mind and asks if he can sleep downstairs inside with me. I don’t think Charlie is going to be comfortable with that, she’s been hanging around just inside while we’re in the garden, I can see her loitering just inside the back door.
Instead, I let him know I’ve planned to call Grandma and he needs to go to bed, this is the truth. He immediately asks if he can say hello. I said yes, lets go on the decking (Away from Charlie), before we’ve even walked up the outside steps. I hear Charlie has gone upstairs and is opening the window next to the top deck. She makes out that she’s not following us, but I know she is. She’s already muttering something that I don’t quite hear.
As we are calling Grandma, Charlie starts saying it’s past Ollies’s bed time (It is 21:20) and she starts saying time for bed Ollie. I can tell from the tone of her voice she is anxious but I am also fed up with not being free to get on with our lives. I put Grandma on speakerphone so that she can also hear the tone and volume of Charlie and appreciate our difficulties in talking. Ollie manages to say ‘Hello Grandma’ before Charlie has got to us and is demanding he goes to bed. Ollie tries to reason with her, but she has flipped. I feel so sad for Ollie and angry at Charlie. This should have been a happy moment and she has ruined it for Ollie.
I am so frustrated, I walk off up the street to finish my call away from the nightmare that is Charlie. After the call with Grandma (my mum), I head home and I already know Charlie has locked me out. She won’t let me in until I say I will call the police.
We have a chat and she says she wants us all to move to be near her family. She says they will support us (but she hasn’t yet told them about any of our problems). I can’t see how taking the children to another country for a divorce is going to be a good thing and say we should get back to doing mediation here and talking about it. Charlie does not want to know. So I say I need sleep and get my things to sleep downstairs. I hear Charlie go upstairs and smash something glass. It takes a lot of cleaning up. It turns out, it was one of our wedding photos Charlie says it fell from a draw and broke by accident, but falling from a draw does not shred photos into lots of tiny pieces.
The next day, I apologise to see how Charlie responds. She thinks it’s my fault for “planning” Ollies call and not telling her. It takes 20 minutes to get her to agree to me taking Ollie & Sam out for a break and some space. Very hard work. She later apologies and says it was emotional talking to her parents and she has a cry. I am exhausted from running around after all these full on emotions. I desperately want to leave Charlie, but can’t see how to safely get the children away from Charlie without risking pushing her into an extreme reaction.
Charlie blaming an event for her emotions is a regular pattern. She cannot see that she is perpetually unhappy and instead thinks that making up a new “plausible” excuse each time is going to fool people. It works the first time, but not forever.