THE CO-PARENTING CRISIS

Her ex-husband cheated on her with a coworker for three years, and she found out only after they already had three very young children together.

The discovery blew up the marriage. She kicked him out and filed for divorce, and he moved in with "his affair partner." During the custody fight, the two of them argued they should get full or primary custody because they were a "two-parent household." The court didn't buy it. They lost, and custody was set at 50-50 with shared parenting time. Before the divorce was even finalized, he married the affair partner anyway.

Since then, the co-parenting has been strained. The poster says she keeps things civil for the children, but mostly uses a co-parenting app and avoids calls and texts. Face-to-face contact is hard. She also says that after learning about the affair, she told his family she had tested for STDs, and he called that "petty and gross."

The children are school-aged now, and she says they prefer her house. They sometimes struggle at their dad's house, and she has them in therapy. She says she warned him and the affair partner not to pressure the kids into calling the woman mom or mama, but that they kept doing it anyway. The kids, she says, do not like the affair partner. They know their father cheated, though she says she does not dump her feelings on them.

Then came Halloween.

At a school event, the ex and the affair partner approached her and said, in a quieter moment, that the affair partner is infertile and cannot have biological children. They told her they had been trying for years. They also said it would mean so much if she would let go of her hate and be kinder to the affair partner, and encourage the kids to bond with her so she would not feel like an outsider forever.

The poster asked why they were telling her "their own personal, private business that was nothing to do with me."

That set him off. He called her response "a disgusting reaction" and said she should have offered sympathies "as my fellow co-parent and our kids third parent." He also accused her of stopping the children from bonding with the affair partner, and later texted her repeatedly about it. In another school meeting, he brought it up again.

She says she walked away to avoid arguing in front of anyone, especially the children. Afterward, she forwarded the texts to her attorney for documentation.

Now she's asking if she was wrong for how she responded, especially after being told that "her infertility was painful," that "she loves our kids," and that as "someone who always wanted to be a mom and got to be," she should be compassionate.