A friend of my future husband is having a hard time with his childrens’ mother. They’re separated, and she is using his care for the kids to prevent him from working and making money so he can try to gain custody while she sleeps around with people she doesn’t even know. Any time he needs her to watch the kids, she’ll take them and leave them with toxic (I don’t exaggerate) family members; felons, drug addicts, and spiteful women. She doesn’t tell him that’s what she’s doing, he hears it from the kids afterwards. She knows rather than risk his children being with her family, he’d rather have them, thus unable to go to work. She has admitted this in text messages.
She’s threatened to kill them and has already lost custody of one from a prior relationship due to her behavior. He tried to get a TRO put into place which was denied, and local family law told him they can’t help him, presumably because she already retained them. Now he needs to find pro-bono lawyers further from home... It’s a mess.
As my previous comment, this will be normalized. It’s horrific.
When I was a teenager, my mother told me, “Never sleep with someone you would not marry.” Boy, oh, boy. Have some of my friends and coworkers made huge mistakes.