Hi Michelle. I can see your struggle to protect your little girl in your posts. When I met my hb, he was already a cg, I didn’t even know what that was at the time. He told me that he was divorced and had a daughter who was 5. It was obvious, that he loved her very much. He lived in Germany at the time and his daughter on the US west coast. Needless to say that he didn’t see her much. According to him, his wife divorced him because …the reasons were many and changed over time….I believed him. He splurged financially when it came to his daughter even though he didn’t have the money really. A year later we moved to the US and things got ugly. Hie ex wanted their daughter to visit us but only during a certain time, no matter how hard we tried to tell her, that the flight was unaffordable on these specific days. She put her daughter on the phone (not quite 7 at the time) and the little girl asked why we didn’t want to see her. She did not come of course.
When my hb was forced into medical retirement, we had no money for months until I got my job back. My hb could not pay the child support and when things got better, he just didn’t want to pay. I was the one making him get the money orders each month, adding a sum for what he owed. He received a letter from his daughter in the mail asking him to please pay the support. A little girl in the middle of all this crap. My hb was mad at his ex and she was mad at him. It was a terrible situation and it went on until his daughter was 18. Always about money with the ex and I hated what was going on. His daughter finally broke free of the dad hating past and they started to build a relationship that was shattered again when he relapsed.
What I had not been told (but suspected) was that the divorce was caused mostly by his gambling. Some really bad facts emerged through the years. Since my hb started his true recovery almost 6 yrs ago, he has a good relationship with his daughter but it took years to come to this.
Today, I understand some of the behavior his ex showed. Been there myself with my own daughter with the only difference that she was older and my hb had no funds to even support himself.
I think a therapist might be a good idea but it would have to be one who is knowledgable about cg. Your ex is and will always be your daughters dad, no matter what. If he becomes an absentee father who puts her last, it might scar her for years to come. Nobody can tell you what to do and I just wanted to tell my story as an example how it should not be.
What really got me was that the ex wife married her long-time bf after she got pregnant at 40, knowing that he was and still is an active alcoholic who relapses badly after long periods of sobriety. So now there are 3 children involved in this addiction mess. Adult or not. I think you have come a very long way in a short amount of time!
