ASK HOLLY: 'Can I ask my ex's new wife to stop judging my parenting style?'

Welcome to Mamamia's advice column, DON'T FREAK OUT, where Holly Wainwright solves your most personal and problematic dilemmas with her sage wisdom. If you have a drama you need solved, email us at helpme@mamamia.com.au — you can be anonymous of course because otherwise, awks.

Dear Holly,

I co-parent my six-year-old son with my ex. We split when he was two, and things are generally pretty okay between us. We should never have been together, really, but we did make this amazing, happy kid who has never known any different.

My ex recently got married and has been with his wife for three years now, so she has been in my son's life for a while. He likes her, and she's nice to him, but really my son's all about me, and his dad. Our custody split is roughly 60/40, with my house as the main base.

Here's my problem:

My ex's wife has always been judgemental about my parenting, I can just tell. But since they got married, it's escalated. I feel her disapproval and it's beginning to really affect me. Some examples:

• She literally shared a story with me on Facebook about children with good manners and just said "thought this was interesting."
• She has messaged me to tell me not to pack my son's iPad in his bag for their place because they "are not a screens family". (This makes me feel like sh*t, frankly).
• She tags me in recipes on Instagram for home-cooked meals, saying my son "would really like this!".
• She wants to bring forward his bedtime and my son tells me that when he stays at Dad's she says it's his "chance" to "catch up on his sleep".
• She messages me to "remind" me that it's mufti day at school, or bring a book day, or whatever because she "knows I'm so busy".

The thing is, I work full-time (hello, I'm a single mum!) and she does not. They don't have kids (yet) and I feel like she's living out all these homemaker fantasies in this part-time parenting, with no respect for just how busy and stretched I am on a daily basis. Things can sometimes be a bit slap-dash, but I love my son to pieces.

I'm beginning to feel like this woman's voice is in my head, every time I pull out something frozen for dinner, or let my son sit on the iPad for a bit while I get something done. Do I need to talk to her? Or my ex? How do I tell her to keep her "perfect" parenting to herself without starting a rift?

Thank you,
Feeling Sh*t. 

***

Okay, Feeling Sh*t.

Two things need to happen. Like, yesterday.

1. This woman needs to step away from the Chat.

She might have the best intentions in the world, only be thinking of your son, and think that she's helping a busy woman out but clearly, her communication is upsetting you. She has misjudged this relationship, and she has misjudged what it feels like to have the most important thing you do critiqued from the outside.

Except she's not really on the outside. She's one foot in, one foot out. She knows your son, and she knows you by one point of separation, literally. You know that she and your ex would have discussed you, their relationship and your mothering, often, since day one of their relationship. And that puts you in a very vulnerable position that she should recognise. That recognition should result in much less sending of articles, tagging of recipes, and cheery text reminders.

I am not a family or relationship counsellor. That is a professional position that requires training and qualifications and maybe you need one of those, or maybe you've had one of those, so of course I'm not going to blithely tell you to do what's best for your son in this situation, because you're his mother and of course you're thinking of that always.

But I am a human woman with enough experience of ex dynamics to know that somewhere here, while your ex's wife is messaging you and you're feeling like sh*te, there's a man who's washing his hands of the whole thing.

So the second thing that needs to happen yesterday is:

2. Your ex needs to enter the Chat.

Not literally, since it sounds like the last thing you'd want is a three-way Group Chat with a chirpy name like Team Tom (if that was your son's name, obviously, if not that would be even weirder).

But he is your child's father. He is the person with whom you share a past and an ultimate responsibility and although it's ideal if everyone in this new family dynamic gets along, it's him who should be communicating with you about your son. Not his wife. Not if it's not what you have asked for, or what you want.

So yes, you should talk to him, calmly. And explain it's his job to draw a boundary between his wife and you.

The third thing that needs to happen is that a law is passed that makes it illegal for a non-parent to tell a parent that their child has too much iPad time.

Non-parents can go ahead and think it, in the silence of their own minds. Or quietly b*tch about the cafe toddlers on screens to their other perfect-parent-non-parent friends. But they do need to STFU about it until the day they would like to leave the confines of their homes and be in a public space while attached to a gremlin with a 30-second attention span. Talk to us then, friends. Or preferably, don't.

And you, Feeling Sh*t, need to get this woman's voice out of your head. Your circumstances are yours alone. Your son is happy. He has people in his who love him. Consistency is important, but you and his step-mother are different people with different needs and your house and "her" house do not need to be identical.

The fact that you don't want to start "World War 3" over this shows how much you've compromised already. To be honest, people have started large-scale conflicts over far less than being tagged in a healthy home-cooked recipe.

So, you're doing great. Keep going xx

What would you do in this situation? Tell us in the comments section below.

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