Here we go fighting in front of children again. Charlie been a bit twitchy all day. Her gym mat which she hasn’t used for a year was missing and turned up in the garage, I had no idea it was out there but Charlie makes repeated comments suggesting I did it whilst children are listening.
I stay out of her way most of the morning, but then Sam and Ollie are a bit bored and fighting so I think of an activity to test range of my new UHF radios which will get the children out of the house for 10 mins. I sit down with Charlie and she says she’s making a shopping list so I tell her I have an activity and call Ollie over for a chat. Ollie is reluctant so I realise I need to sell this a bit harder – who doesn’t have children that say ‘no’ when first asked to do something. I get Ollie & Sam down stairs and as I’m talking to Sam, Ollie wanders off.
I realise he’s still not on board but I think he will be if I can just get him to talk to Sam about the plan. Charlie has come downstairs as well and tells Ollie to go and find something else to do. I’m annoyed, she’s not helping and is making it harder for me to do an activity with the children. I go to get Ollie and Charlie is stood in my way, she won’t let me get Ollie back and starts questioning me.
I am frustrated, the children are bored, I’ve got an idea which I think they will like, but Charlie is now involved and it’s getting harder to look after the children. I ask Charlie to move, she says no and blocks me in the room. It’s not like she is doing anything with the children. So I ask her more loudly to let me organise something with the children. Charlie continues to say no, I now cannot talk to Sam or Ollie because Charlie is in my face.
Charlie starts shouting at me for shouting and it just feels ridiculous. If Charlie had carried on organising the shopping like she had said, then none of this would be happening. Instead, she has interfered and is now accusing me of being nasty to the children. So we have a shouting match, it seems OK for Charlie to accuse me of anything she likes whilst taking no responsibility for herself. She cannot even explain why she came downstairs. She was just following me around.
We manage to calm things down a little, the children are upset and suggest we all sit down and take turns to talk. Charlie is having none of it, she storms off and is banging doors and is crashing things around in the bedrooms. The rest of us sit down and in 5 minutes we have a plan to do an activity which tests the range of the radios by walking to the park. The children are organised, I am organise. Charlie is off doing her own thing. I ask Charlie when she is going to the shops, she says she doesn’t know, but then when I start getting Sam and Evan on their bikes. Charlie says she’s going shopping right now.
It’s so hard to organise anything when Charlie is not organised, she has no plan, she just reacts to everything that others are doing and it makes it harder for everybody else. It’s walking on eggshells trying to only do things that Charlie won’t react negatively too. Eventually I get Sam and Evan out the house and Charlie is still shouting inside and heckling me as I talk to the girls.
After the bike ride – I get home. Charlie has the suitcases out again and says she will leave. I see there is spit on the floor too which I clean up. I try to calm things down and say I’ve heard her point of view. She thinks that I talk her down in front of the children and she doesn’t like it. I agree that I have heard her point. In my head I’m thinking how she talks me down every day but I keep quiet.
I point out to her that if she comes between me and the children then I am going to get angry because she’s taking away the thing that is most important to me. I didn’t need her involvement in organising an activity. Charlie responds to everything I say by putting the whole thing back on me, she doesn’t acknowledge or say she understands my perspective. She turns everything so I look like the aggressor when she is the one that follows me, she is the one that interferes and disrupts what I am doing, she is the one that never took responsibility for doing anything. Her behaviour comes over as very deliberate, but talking to her later it’s like she has no idea what she has done. We manage to make peace and show the children that as it’s important they get some reassurance.
Whilst talking I point out to Charlie that we had a letter this week from the family help place (Our neighbour referred us after a previous public fight). I suggest they could help, Charlie says she screwed up the letter and threw it in the bin. She also puts that on me, because when I gave her the letter on Thursday I said I didn’t want to deal with it right now. Which is true, I was a bit shaken by it arriving. It means we had been referred by somebody and I didn’t initially know who. I didn’t want to deal with Charlie’s initial reaction, but that wasn’t a reason for her to throw it away. Charlie is dismissive about the referral.
It’s like even when help is offered, Charlie refuses to engage. Instead she suggests that I need help for my shouting. I explain that I’m just frustrated, we’ve been married nearly 13 years and I’m fed up of dealing with the same issues over and over. For example – I’ve twice found the downstairs heater left on high when we sleep. Charlie says it must be the children getting up early even though the heater is next to her desk. Two nights later I find again the header left on full power when I get up in the morning, it’s hot and I don’t like the idea of an unwatched heater on full power whilst we all sleep upstairs. These simple things crop up continually. There’s just a lack of cleaning up and putting things back after herself which makes it good behaviour harder to enforce with the children as well.