Holiday Drama

This is terrible. 3 posts in then I’m gone for over a month. Not the most promising stepmom blog you’ve ever seen, huh? The truth is, so much has been going on that I didn’t even know where to start. I was so incredibly angry after the Easter saga. Looking back I know why I got so angry but it just exhausts me because this is the same story with Gollum. Control, control, control. Even though it’s much in the past, this is what happened on Easter that set me off.

Gollum told us she would call at 4:30 or 5 when we could come pick my girl up from her moms house where she was having Easter lunch. Keep in mind that this holiday is “hers” this year. We do not have any legal right to see my girl on this day, for this particular year. Somehow over the past 2 or 3 years, we’ve fallen into a pattern of sharing every holiday. This is a gray area that makes me absolutely nuts. Of course we want to see my girl on every holiday and both of our families want to see her as well. As a result of that, we started splitting up the actual day of the holiday so that we could all see her on Easter and Thanksgiving, for example. This makes me nuts because Gollum will rarely set a time for us to pick up my girl on this split day and we are then at her mercy and our holiday and time spent with our families is controlled by her and her decision as to when we can pick up my girl. Why don’t we just stop the split days and tell her we should keep holidays as they are set by the court? I know, I’ve thought that too. But then how do I tell Big Papa that we shouldn’t make an effort to see my girl on these important days? Especially when I want to see her just as much. It’s a catch-22 for sure and frustrates me to no end.

So the week before Easter rolls around and Gollum offers for us to have my girl for a few hours on this day (assuming that we will reciprocate next year when Easter is our holiday). I asked Big Papa many times to nail down a time with her. I also told him to ask if we could get my girl at 5PM , and instead of rushing around to return her in a few hours, why not just keep her overnight and take her to school Monday morning? He finally called on Saturday and Gollum refused both requests. She refused to let my girl spend the night since she had a spelling test in the morning. I guess we are too irresponsible to handle getting her to school and making sure she gets a good night sleep. I get fired up then let it go. Fast forward to Easter and we are at my mom’s house, having a great time and anticipating that Gollum will call around 4:30 to let us know that we can come pick up my girl from her mother’s house. Big Papa gets a call at 5PM from HIS PARENTS HOUSE. It’s GOLLUM. She is saying that she didn’t have her cell phone and just stopped by our house and we weren’t there and so just dropped my girl off at Big Papa’s parent’s house because they are right around the corner from us. I think you could literally see the steam coming from my ears. I said “how is she not near a phone? Isn’t there one at her moms house she can use before she left to at least let us know that she is coming??” My anger comes from the fact that she is, yet again, controlling how our holiday is spent. Maybe not the whole day but I promise you the whole day I was anticipating something like this. My anger also comes from the fact that my girl’s greeting to us once we got to his parents house was “WHERE WERE YOU? We were knocking and knocking and you weren’t there.” Breaks my heart. I don’t want to think that Gollum purposefully didn’t call us before she left her mom’s house but this woman is jealous and vindictive and tries to be sneaky. She is never outright mean. She cares too much about how she is perceived by others to do that. My mother-in-law thought I was upset because my girl was dropped off at her house. I don’t even know why she would think that. But I broke down into tears. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. We have at least 11 more years of this unless something drastic changes. What needs to change so that I can actually look forward to a holiday?