The Fight Goes On…
If it isn’t one thing with my X, it’s another. Right now, there’s tension on two fronts. First is the ongoing battle about the correct amount of child support. He got a new job making double what he used to make, and his lawyer claimed that he only had to pay $20 a month more. Snort! Like I was going to take THAT lying down. We’re still in negotiations over that, though with the paperwork I got today, I think we are getting closer to an agreement.
The second is this weekend. It’s a visitation weekend, but the younger boy has a soccer game on Saturday morning, and both boys have committed to be at church by 10:30 on Sunday to sing and acolyte in services. So X e-mails to tell me that he and the kids are going to take “a day trip” to Chattanooga to meet up with X’s brothers who are in the area for the weekend. They’ll leave after soccer and be back in time for church. Right. We live in Memphis, which is at the extreme southwestern corner of Tennessee. Chattanooga is SIX HOURS away. The soccer game is at 9 and lasts an hour. So I figure they’ll leave here at 10:30 and get to Chattanooga at 4:00 — only that’s 5:00 Chattanooga time. Pretty much everything will be closed or nearly closed. And even if they turned around and came straight back, which seems kind of pointless, they wouldn’t get back to Memphis until about 10. Which is way past the kids’ bedtime. And they can’t sleep in on Sunday.
So X is ticked off because I told him it was a bad idea. He can’t understand why I’m always telling him he can’t do stuff. How do you explain to a 40-year-old man that he can’t do stuff because the stuff he wants to do is stupid, if not dangerous. I haven’t forgotten the 2 a.m. call from my son, telling me that they’d stopped on their way back from St. Louis to “buy Daddy some coffee so he won’t fall asleep while he’s driving.” I AM NOT going to go through THAT again!
I THINK I’ve got him talked into meeting his brothers in Nashville, which is only three hours away. They could get there by 1 and spend four or five hours doing stuff, and still get home and into bed at a reasonable time.