I had coffee with a good friend of mine who is a BM last week. She's an awesome person, but our hectic lives mean that we typically only get together to play "catch up" about once a year. She's been divorced for about 13 years, and has two daughters, 17 and 14. Her ex is remarried and is a stepfather to two girls about 8 and 10, who live with them full-time.

We haven't talked too much about our respective roles as BM and SM, but we happened to get into a conversation about it this time. She strikes me as a relatively cool BM, in that she knows her kids like the SM and doesn't try to jeopardize their relationship with her.

What's striking is that during the conversation, she started talking about how her kids get super frustrated about when they have to go to Dad's house (he lives about an hour away), and that they feel like he's really strict and doesn't understand when they want to hang with their friends instead. One of her daughters recently said to her, "Dad doesn't even know me." And my friend also told me that because her kids don't really want to go over there that much, she helps them by allowing them to invent excuses, which she doesn't tell the ex are not true. My friend also sometimes doesn't tell him things that she knows he wouldn't agree with -- for example, that she put her oldest on birth control. Or that she may decide to send her abroad for a month this summer, even though she knows her ex doesn't agree to this. My friend admitted that he is a good dad, and even drives 2 hours one way on weekends he doesn't have the kids, to see the younger one play volleyball. Even so, the last time she talked to her ex, she criticized him for not knowing enough about their daughters' lives. She even said, "You don't even know the names of your daughters' three best friends!"

I was really struck by all this. And so I offered her my perspective: that my own DH, who wants very much to be in his kids' lives, has been effectively shut out of his kids' lives, despite his best efforts. I told her that so many of the things she says mirror things that are going on with us, and that all these things add up to subtly undermine his relationship with his children. I offered the following arguments, from my side of the fence.

1) DH was kicked out of their house by BM. Now he lives 20 minutes away. He gets to see his kids every other weekend. My guess is that his daughters might also complain that Dad doesn't know as much about their lives as Mom. But how can he? He's not there every day. He may know the names of some of his daughters' friends, but honestly, how is he really going to know them? They never come over to our house. Why? Because their "lives" -- their school, their neighborhood, the places they hang out -- are at BM's house. Wouldn't the same be true of BM if the situation were reversed?

2) Helping the kids not go over there is a subtle form of PAS. Sure, it's understandable that the kids would rather be at Mom's because of #1 above. It's not so much that they want to be with Mom -- it's that they want to be home when the phone rings and their friends want to go out. But imagine if the situation were reversed. Wouldn't it suck for you, as a parent, to know that your kids don't really want to go over to your house? You can bet that their father knows this on some level, and that it makes him feel really sad and helpless.

3) Not telling him things like the birth control thing or the trip : these are things that our BM has done. My DH had to find out the hard way that OSD was sexually active at 15 -- because BM didn't tell him. Don't you have a clause in your DD that says you are supposed to decide all major medical, health, etc. decisions jointly? (They do.) Don't you think that this is a pretty major decision?
And as far as the trip: Our BM allowed -- even encouraged -- OSD to go on a trip for 5 days out of state with her friends and no adult supervision, at 16 years old. She KNEW DH had expressly said no, and she let OSD go anyway. In fact, in a phone conversation she had with DH while OSD was in the room, she said, "It's my weekend -- you can't do anything about it!"
My feeling is, to be fair to the noncustodial parent, the custodial parent ought to ask herself this question: "If he was still living here and I was still married to him, would he be involved in this decision?" If yes, and unless there is a COMPELLING reason not to (such as a criminal record or evidence that he is an unfit parent in some way) then you have an obligation to him to tell him these things and allow him as much say as you have.

In the end, I said, I think it ultimately hurts the kids to have the impression that their dad doesn't care about them as much as their mom. They need all the love they can get, and they need to know as surely as possible that their dad would walk through fire for them. She sat there in silence for a second, and said, "Wow, you've really given me a perspective I didn't see at all." She said that she was going to talk to her kids and explain to them a lot of these things, and work hard at not portraying him as a jerk to them. After we left, she sent me an email and told me that she had called her ex -- first time in a long time -- and gave him a bunch of updates on upcoming events, doctor visits, etc. I really hope that this will help everyone in the long run.

I really wish our BM had a friend who was a stepmom who could tell her some of this stuff.

BB