My XW (f34) and I (m53) split because of the fallout/insanity following her spectacular new take on professional-level cheating - DM me for the deets if you really want to know.

She then went on to badmouth me to everyone she could find on social media. She gaslit my family and friends about me because her family was unavailable for her -- they had cut her off many years before -- and she doesn't have any friends of her own. She sold them more fables than Grimm. This caused me to lose most of my friends and to lose contact with a lot of my family. I won't go into the list of everything she took when she sneaked out while I was at work, but suffice it to say it included the car, the cash in our shared bank accounts, most of the furniture, and our baby daughter.

She then immediately put an order of protection against me with baseless accusations of various forms of abuse which were then later dropped after police/court investigations revealed that her accusations were false and turned up nothing. She initially secured full custody over our then 1 year old daughter with me having only 2 hours every other week of supervised visitation in a courthouse surrounded by police. That situation ended after the investigations, and eventually I got back 50/50 custody.

All of that happened about 5 years ago. Since then things have changed quite a bit, and in the last year or two my family has stopped interacting with her almost completely, with many taking steps to repair their relationship with me. I've done my best to try to be understanding, and forgiving where I am having trouble actually understanding. I have remained in contact with my XW, but only to discuss issues with our daughter, carefully avoiding anything outside of custody issues or decisions about our daughter. I have put in a lot of effort to be a really good co-parent with her and am very active in our daughter's well being, and I stoically do not allow my residual anger to guide me in any way.

More recently my XW has begun initiating what I can only describe as "friendly conversations" about things apart from only strictly conversations about our daughter. She has seemingly changed her approach to interacting with me after it became clear that I wasn't trying to discuss her treatment of me during the divorce, or the issues that led to it in our marriage. I don't see how rehashing the past with her will make the future better. She knows what she did, and she knows I know, so I don't feel the need to discuss these painful topics that she obviously wants to avoid.

Currently, whenever our daughter is at one parent's house, the other parent talks to our daughter in the evening. We've been doing this for years, every night. In the last year or so, during these calls, my XW will interrupt to tell our daughter to tell me something. This invariably is something she wants our daughter to tell me about her day or something upcoming that our daughter is excited about... that is... until last night.

Last night when I spoke with our daughter my ex interrupted to tell me she had planted sod in her backyard, and she invited me to come and hang out in their back yard and have a picnic once the grass starts growing.

She invited me... to hang out... AT HER HOUSE?! She wants to have picnics!?

Now here's the thing, I still have very strong feelings about my ex, both good and bad. Either way both directions have strong feelings involved. I wouldn't have chosen to break up our marriage, I was trying to get us into therapy at the time. She is basically a good mother to our daughter, and she had her strong points as a partner when we were together. I'm attracted to her physically, intellectually, and aesthetically. HOWEVER... She mistreated me and many in my family in the extreme, and caused me to lose a lot of time with my daughter, while causing me to doubt my own sanity and forcing me to seek trauma-based therapy to claw back some of who I used to be.

I don't trust her, but I want to. I want to believe our dead marriage isn't as dead as it seems, that we can get back some of what we had before, that maybe somehow she's grown up a little and matured a bit and is now wanting our life back, but I also know that's a pipe dream and would never happen.

I don't really have anything I need to hear other than the obvious, but I needed to let this out and breathe. Thanks for reading my epic post.