Goodstorie

My ex-wife, Rita, and I have been divorced for the past 8 years. We also have a 15-year-old daughter together, whom we have been co-parenting ever since we got divorced. We haven’t had any significant problems so far, but recently she did something that made me reconsider letting her have custody of our daughter anymore. On top of that, she’s also getting divorced from her new husband, and she’s blaming me for it, which I really think is unfair.

She got remarried about 2 years ago after being in a relationship with her new husband, **Adrien**, for almost 3 years. I haven’t met him many times; we had a really short interaction at their wedding, but from whatever my daughter has told me so far, he seems like a nice guy. The person that my daughter does not get along with is his son. Adrien’s son, **Derek**, is 3 years older than our daughter and recently graduated high school. I’ve not met that kid many times either, but my daughter has told me that he is really arrogant and a bit of a bully at times, so she just mostly steers clear of him because they don’t get along. Even Rita knows that our daughter doesn’t like him, so I guess it was especially cruel for her to steal our daughter’s savings so she could throw a party for her stepson.

Derek recently graduated high school, but his father was not happy with his grades because he had managed to just somehow scrape by, and the chances of him getting into even a half-decent college were really slim. He doesn’t really feel sorry about it, even though his counselor had told him a lot of times that he needed to step up and start doing better if he wanted to get into his choice of college. He hadn’t taken any of that seriously, and now him and his father were on really bad terms because his dad thought he was wasting his time, and so he did not want to celebrate his son’s graduation.

I don’t want to comment on whether that’s right or wrong because that’s their personal thing, but I do feel that if his biological father had said that he did not want his son’s graduation to be celebrated, Rita should have taken that into consideration and not gone out of her way to throw a party for him, knowing that her husband wouldn’t like it. After all, she has only known Derek for a couple of years, and Adrien has been raising him his entire life. I think Adrien would know better. But anyway, she chose to throw a party for him, and since she couldn’t exactly ask Adrien for money because then he would find out that she was hosting a party for him, she decided to steal from our daughter.

My daughter has a joint account with us and has her own card too, and both her mother and I occasionally deposit some money in her account for her future. She has also been saving up on her own, working a part-time job since last year because she wants to buy a nice car for herself on her 18th birthday, and I think with a little help from us, she’ll definitely be able to do it. And Rita knows all of this, which is really infuriating. Anyway, a couple of days ago, Rita took the card without telling our daughter while she had been napping and used it to make all the purchases for the party. She ended up spending almost three grand on the party, and now my daughter’s just left with around $200. It’s incredibly unfair because not only had she been working for this money, but she had also put aside every check that she received as gifts, and it was her own money, so Rita had no right to do that to her.

Confrontation and Consequences

Naturally, when our daughter found out about it, she was very upset. It didn’t take her long to discover what her mother had done, and the very next day after she found out, she decided to confront Rita. That was a day before the party, and Rita told my daughter to “cut out the drama” because the party was going to be hosted whether she liked it or not. She said that all the money that our daughter had was because of the two of us anyway, so none of it was her own. That was simply not true because I think I’ve already mentioned that our daughter had been working to get that money, so not only was that unfair, but it was also unfair for Rita to claim that she wouldn’t have that money if it had not been for us.

On top of that, she decided to tell our daughter that this money was going towards her “brother’s” party fund, and that was something that she should be happy about instead of acting like a brat because she’s going to be there at the party too. She tried to make it sound like Derek was a bigger victim than her because his father had refused to contribute to throwing a party for him, even though it was a big deal that he had graduated high school. She just wanted to do something nice for her stepson, so she expected our daughter to be happy about that as well because after all, they were a family and she should be happy to make “little sacrifices for her family.” It was all nonsense, and I could tell that Rita was reaching to make it sound like she hadn’t done anything wrong and downplay the seriousness of what had happened.

Luckily, our daughter did not fall for her act, and even though it was her mother’s turn to stay with her, she decided to pack up her stuff and come back to me. She’s been here for a couple of days and has simply refused to go back to staying with her mom for the rest of the month and has even been telling me that she doesn’t even want to go back next month because she feels betrayed, and rightfully so. The only thing that she wants is her money back, and so do I. So I’ve been trying to reason with Rita for the past couple of days. The party has already happened, and she keeps telling me that the money didn’t belong to our daughter anyway, so she needs to stop making a fuss about it and has told me that she’s not going to be returning the money.

I find it really unreasonable, and I have called her out on her behavior because I think she’s being stingy. She has a nice job and makes a decent amount of money, so she could totally afford to throw that party by herself. And her defense for that is that she’s been trying to save up money for our daughter’s future so she can go to college without working her way through it like we did or taking out a student loan, so ultimately what she did is not that bad considering how she’s planning to make up for it. I don’t understand the logic behind it, and neither do I want to, because I think it’s a bunch of baloney. Anyway, we’ve been fighting over it a lot, and I’ve told her that I want the money back by hook or by crook, but she has been straight up refusing to pay our daughter back and has been making up excuses about it.

Reaching Out to Adrien and Rita’s Outburst

It had been really frustrating, so yesterday, with no other option left, I decided to contact Adrien to talk to him about it. By then, it had become quite obvious that talking to Rita was not going to help take me anywhere, and she was bent on not returning the money. And since the money had technically been spent on Derek and his party, I decided to talk to his father about it. I didn’t have his number, so I sent him a message on Facebook and explained the entire situation to him. I told him that I was really sorry to be doing this, but my daughter is very upset, and I think it’s unfair. I ended the message by telling him that it would be really great if he would be able to convince Rita to pay back the money or make some arrangements himself.

I was polite enough, and I received a reply within hours. It was him apologizing for the entire situation and telling me that he had no idea that this was how Rita had afforded to pay for the party. He told me that he would send me the money right away, and I sent him my details. He transferred me the money almost immediately, and finally there was a solution to all of this, and both my daughter and I were pretty content with how the situation had finally turned out. She was obviously still very upset with her mother, and so was I, so we had made up our minds that we wouldn’t speak to her until she apologized. But I hardly think that’s likely to happen anymore because this morning she showed up at my house and started screaming at both of us, accusing us of ruining her marriage.

Apparently, after I had sent that message to Adrien last evening, he had come back home from work and picked up a huge fight. He had already been quite unhappy about the fact that she had decided to throw a party for Derek in the first place because that was not what he wanted. He did not think that his son deserved a party because his grades and behavior had been disappointing, and in spite of that, Rita had gone against what he had said and thrown that party for him. And now, on top of that, he had to find out from me that she hadn’t even used her own money to fund that party; she had stolen from her daughter, and in his eyes, that was unforgivable. He also believes that it was humiliating for him as well, and now he wants a divorce.

I don’t know how any of this is my fault because I personally feel like she had brought this all on to herself with her unreasonable behavior. I was already pretty upset that she was yelling at me and accusing me of ruining her marriage, but the fact that she was even acting that way towards our own daughter, especially after how she had treated her for the past couple of days, was unacceptable for me. So I asked our daughter to go back inside because she had no reason to be dealing with this nonsense, and then I stood my ground and I told Rita that whatever was happening to her right now, it was her own fault, and she had no right to barge into our home and start screaming at us like this.

That made her even more upset, and she started cursing me out and told me that she knew that I wasn’t happy about the fact that she had found somebody again and was in a loving relationship with her husband and that I was just doing all of this to ruin her marriage because I was jealous of her happiness. I literally ended up rolling my eyes at that because we had been divorced for a really long time, and I couldn’t care less what she was up to. In fact, I had even attended her wedding as a guest and was happy for her because we had been on good terms so far. So all these accusations and things that she was saying were baseless, and after a while, I started getting really irritated. So I told her that I wanted her to leave because she was not about to gaslight us into believing that any of this was our fault.

When I asked her to leave, she didn’t go away, and instead she told me that she was not going anywhere until I called her husband up. I told her that everything had been a huge misunderstanding, and Rita hadn’t done anything wrong. Obviously, I refused to do that and told her that she was crazy, but that made her start acting even crazier, and she started stomping all around the room, telling me that she was not going anywhere until I fixed what I had damaged. She was screaming at me all this while, cursing relentlessly, just acting like a total psycho, to be honest. I started feeling really uncomfortable after a while because there was clearly something wrong with her. I kept asking her to leave, and then eventually I had to tell her that if she did not go away, I would call the cops because I really couldn’t think of any other way to deal with it at that point.

She started sobbing uncontrollably and fell to the floor and told me that this was all my fault and now I was threatening her with the cops as if she was the bad guy. The whole thing was so bizarre. She was acting so unstable that I couldn’t even make sense of it. Eventually, she started mumbling about how her biggest mistake had been marrying me and then having a daughter with me, and now she was stuck with both of us in her life, and we were ruining everything for her. I could handle everything as long as she was just keeping it directed towards me, but the second she dragged our daughter into it, I lost it. I snapped at her and told her that there was no need for her to worry about me and her daughter being a part of her life anymore because soon enough I’ll be speaking to my lawyer and filing for full custody of our daughter, and given the current circumstances, I’m sure our daughter won’t mind either, and neither will she.

Then she started wailing at the top of her lungs and started telling me that I was a horrible person, I was ruining her life, and that she didn’t deserve any of this. But by then, I was in a terrible mood, and I had lost all sympathy for her. I did not even care that she seemed to be in a terrible mental state. I just told her that after everything that she had done, she deserved everything that she was going through right now, so Adrien was definitely doing the right thing by leaving her, and soon enough we would be gone from her life too. She tried to start crying some more and probably for sympathy, but I just grabbed her by the arm and lifted her to her feet, and then I threw her out of my house. It was a little rough, but I had to do it. Now she’s texting me non-stop about how she’s going through a lot already and I should have been respectful and understanding instead of acting the way I did. I’m just really confused. Am I the A-hole for telling my ex-wife that she deserves to be left by her husband and throwing her out of my house?

Moving Towards Full Custody

Hey, thank you for all the comments, and I have now decided I need to block Rita so she can’t bother me anymore. The past couple of days have been really stressful for me, and given her behavior in the recent past, I think it would be in all our best interests for me to file for full custody of our daughter. I’ve even spoken to my daughter about it, and she feels the same way, so I’ve reached out to my lawyer. Our daughter has told me that it wasn’t just me that Rita was bothering with her endless messages about how we should have been kinder to her given everything that she was going through. She had been sending the exact same messages to her daughter as well. I don’t know how she feels entitled to kindness from us when she has been so unkind to our daughter recently, anyway, but both of us have blocked her, and we’re going to try and keep her out of our lives now.

To be honest, her behavior when she came over the other day had been really unstable and scary, and I really don’t think that I want anything to do with her anymore. I’m pretty sure there’s something wrong with her, and I can’t put my finger on it, but I’m sure there’s something going on with her. Whatever is going on with her, it doesn’t concern me personally, but since our daughter is legally supposed to spend half the month with her due to our custody arrangement, it does concern me because of that. I know she’s not going to be happy about the fact that I’m filing for full custody, and she’s probably going to try and throw a tantrum to get me to change my mind, but I’m not doing that. So far, we have mostly been on good terms, and even though we have had our disagreements, we have managed to work through them. Recently though, I just don’t know what’s gotten into her, and the fact that even Adrien has decided to leave her, it speaks volumes about how insufferable she’s been lately.

I had been a little doubtful about whether I was doing the right thing by filing for full custody, but after reading through the comments, I think I need to do it because stealing money from our own daughter—that’s just crazy. It wasn’t like a spur-of-the-moment decision, I’m pretty sure of that. She had time to think it through because our daughter has spending limits set on her account, and I’m sure that Rita had to make some calls to modify that before she could use the card. And now that I think about it, I don’t know the code to use my daughter’s card either, so I’m guessing that even Rita had no idea, and she had to go through our daughter’s diary or something because I know that’s how she always keeps track of all her passwords and stuff. So this couldn’t have possibly been a decision she made without thinking it through, and that’s the scary part of it.

Shocking Revelations from Adrien

So I recently spoke to my lawyer, and we filed for full custody a couple of days ago. I don’t think she has been served yet though, because then she would probably be at my door again. Anyway, I’m already dreading that, so I don’t want to talk about it. I do however want to talk about what I found out from Adrien today. He decided to pay us a visit in the evening, and I thought it was really strange because it was not like we were friends. We hadn’t even interacted that much, and now that he’s getting divorced from Rita, we wouldn’t have anything to talk about anyway. I figured that there must have been something very important that he had to discuss with me if he had showed up in person to talk to me, and so we got to talking, and that’s how I found out that Rita had recently been diagnosed with **bipolar disorder**.

It had been a couple of months, even though her behavior had been very strange for a while now. That’s why he had decided that she needed to speak to a professional a couple of months ago, and that’s how she had been diagnosed. Obviously, that was not great, but it did explain her very strange behavior recently. She had been acting quite irrationally, and she was clearly unstable, and after speaking to her therapist, Adrien found out that she had refused to take any medication, and she had also been quite irregular with her sessions. Her therapist had tried to contact him several times to inform him because he was the one who had requested to be in the loop, but she did not want him to find out. Rita had even blocked her therapist’s number from his phone. This was all really shocking, but it got worse when he told me that the party she had thrown for Derek had mostly been because Derek had found out that she had been acting like a **kleptomaniac**, stealing stuff from pretty much everywhere.

One time she hadn’t even been caught shoplifting while she was with him, but thankfully Derek went to school with the store manager’s son and had somehow managed to get her free. He had been holding that against her, and that’s why she had decided to throw him that party. And Adrien had only found out about all of it recently, and he had found out about it from Derek because Rita had refused to speak up about it. His son had come and told him about it because he felt pretty guilty about everything that was going on and had confessed that he had been the one forcing her to throw a party for him, but he had no idea that this would have such dire consequences. So I’m guessing that’s why Rita had chosen to steal the money from our daughter instead of just paying for it herself, probably for the thrill of it or something. I don’t know what her reasons were, but one thing has been established, and that’s the fact that Rita is not stable right now. She has no business being around our daughter.

Adrien told me that because we have shared custody of our daughter, he felt like it was important for him to mention all these things to me. He also ended up telling me that he felt incredibly guilty about the fact that he was leaving her while she was in such a bad state, but he had no other option because this was starting to affect his son now. His son had always been a bit disturbed ever since he lost his mother 9 years ago, and even though he had been very attached to her and everyone loved her, she had also had severe depression after her cancer diagnosis, and he didn’t want something like that to happen to his son again. He couldn’t afford to have that happen again, and that’s why he was leaving. I reassured him that he was doing the right thing for his child because that’s what’s most important. As for Rita, I know that she has her parents and the rest of her family, and they’ll take care of her, but our kids only have us, and we should always prioritize them.

After we had that little chat, both of us felt considerably better about everything, and then he left. He told me that he had already filed for divorce, and when I told him that I had filed for custody as well, we were a bit worried about how Rita was going to take it, but then it’s not like we had any other options, and we had already done what had to be done, so there was no looking back. I do kind of feel bad for her because it’s all going to happen at once, and it’s definitely going to be very difficult for her to handle it all, but I’m just hoping that her parents are there for her and are able to handle her emotions, which I know for a fact are going to be all over the place once she finds out that I’m going to keep our daughter with me until I deem her fit to be a mother again. I don’t mean to sound overly righteous about myself, but honestly, right now she should just focus on getting better for her own sake, and I truly hope that she does get better soon, and I really mean that from the bottom of my heart.

Rita’s Parents and the Custody Battle

Hey, so Rita’s mother called me today and told me that she had been served with the papers earlier, and she has been devastated ever since. Even my ex-mother-in-law was crying on the phone while she was speaking to me, and I felt terrible for her because I knew it couldn’t be easy for her to deal with Rita right now, given everything that she was going through. But I tried to do my best to explain to her that I really had to do this. I wasn’t sure if Rita had told her everything about the reason why she was getting a divorce and also why I was demanding full custody, so I narrated the entire incident to her and I told her everything that I knew, including everything that Adrien had recently told me, and I explained to my mother-in-law that after all this, she couldn’t possibly expect me to not want to keep my daughter with me.

I thought that she would be surprised by all that information because I was certain that Rita must have left a lot of important details out to make her look like the good guy, but to my surprise, she had confessed everything to her parents, and they knew that she had been wrong everywhere. They told me that they had been aware of the fact that she had developed bipolar disorder recently and had even started stealing. She had been telling them about it herself for the last couple of months, and it’s not like she didn’t feel bad about it herself; she felt terrible, but she just couldn’t bring herself to stop, and she needed help—not only help from the professionals, but she also needed people to be there for her and support her through all of this emotionally. But instead, we were running away from her, and she thought that as her mother, it was simply not acceptable that we were treating her daughter like this. She told me that she herself, even more than Rita, felt betrayed and told us that it was really cruel of us.

For a second, I was really annoyed that she was trying to make it seem like Rita was the victim here, even though we were also the victims of her behavior. But then I decided to calm down for a second and think about it from her perspective. Of course, being a parent, I would also feel bad for my kid if they were going through something like this and people started leaving her alone. I have a daughter, and I know how she felt, and that’s why I told her that I could understand what she was going through, maybe not fully, but at least I could try. But even then, I told her that I couldn’t change my mind about what I was about to do because I’m sure that even if she had been in my place, she wouldn’t have changed her mind either and would have looked out for her daughter like she was doing right now. That seemed to get her to think about it, and then she didn’t say anything, just abruptly hung up the phone, and that was it. I don’t know what to make of that, but I’m just hoping that things go well for everyone after this.

A Year Later: New Beginnings

So it’s been almost a year since my last update, and I’ve been really busy with everything, so I didn’t have time to post anything. Anyway, Rita ended up getting divorced, and even though she put up a good fight, she lost custody of our daughter because my daughter wanted to stay with me. However, we did not end things on a bitter note. She ended up apologizing to me and to our daughter after she lost custody and told us that she would definitely try and get better for our daughter’s sake. It was really emotional, and we promised to keep in touch because a couple of weeks after that, she told us that she was leaving the city, moving out of state to start fresh and leave everything behind her. Maybe this would help her out, and she also promised us that she would be regularly attending therapy sessions and taking her medication.

So we have been in touch for the past couple of months ever since she moved away. She’s been trying to make it up to our daughter by sending her handmade gifts every alternate weekend. It’s a new hobby, and it’s good for both of them, so that’s nice. A lot of things have changed for me as well because a couple of months ago, I met a woman at work, and right now we’re going quite strong. She also has a daughter who’s a couple of years younger than my daughter. We have introduced them to each other, and they’ve become the best of friends. Even though we have been together for just around 7 months, my girlfriend and I have a really strong connection, and I’m planning on getting married in a year or two. We have decided that we’re going to move together by the end of the year, and I’m really excited about what the future is about to bring.

I’m content with life right now, and I’m doing well. My personal life is great, and most importantly, my daughter is also doing well. Hopefully, she’ll be able to reconcile with her mother fully once again, and I hope that day comes soon. But for now, everything is great, and that’s all that I have to say. Thank you guys for all the lovely supportive comments and messages I received, and if you guys are reading this, thank you for checking up on us. It really means a lot to me, so thanks.