AIO for being annoyed my kid's mom told him I 'couldn't afford' the trip?
me (45M), divorced, two teenagers. my son (16M) wanted to do a school trip, about 1,900 dollars. we split extras 50/50 in the order. i said i'd need to do it over three months and asked if we could talk about timing. that's what i said, in a text, which i still have. what my son heard was that dad couldn't afford it. he told me that in the car, not angrily, just as a fact — "mom said you couldn't afford it so she's covering it." she did cover it. she paid the whole thing. i'm not upset about the money. i'd have got there. i'm upset that my 16 year old now has a fact in his head about me that came from her and not from me, and it's the kind of fact a kid remembers. i brought it up and she said she was managing his disappointment on a deadline and didn't have time to workshop the wording. which is a real thing. deadlines are real. i still can't get past it.
What People Are Saying
Don't show him the text, baby. Just say it. Showing him receipts turns it into a case and he has to pick a side.
Not overreacting. "Over three months" and "can't afford it" are different sentences and she picked the one that made her the solution.
the thing about kids is they don't relitigate. whatever they heard at 16 is the file and it doesn't get updated unless you update it.
showing him the text feels petty and also i think you're right that it's the only way the record gets corrected
OR on the money, NOR on the framing. She had a deadline and she also had thirty seconds to say "dad's doing it in installments."
@denise_holds_down+214
NOR. And the fix is you tell him yourself, once, calmly: here's what I actually said, here's the text. Not to make her the villain — so his version has two sources.