I’m (36) going through a mutual consent divorce right now. We have one son. She left me in august the day after our anniversary and moved in with her boyfriend she’d been plotting to leave me for once I found out they were more than friends and had been sleeping together already.

Our son started school in my district, but I have a full-time job and she is unemployed… so for the time being, I was getting him to school, she picked him up in the afternoons and then returned him home to me at 8pm to rest up for the next day… we alternate weekends.

She’s followed this schedule exactly once. Most days she drops him off hours early. Others she complains that she can’t pick him up because it’s too long of a drive from her bf’s house (it’s only 5 mins longer than the drive I take every day to my office) and it’s going to “wear her car out”. She gripes about not being able to feed herself more than 1 meal a day or afford gas (I’m already helping her pay for both). And she wants him to move in with her and her bf and for me to only see him on weekends. She still won’t look for a decent job either which was one of the things that put strain on our relationship was how she would spend on credit without telling me and had no income to cover it besides mine.

I’m tracking all of this, but how useful is this information to a mediator? I’m concerned i’ll be stuck with having to litigate instead and she has already tried to hit me with domestic violence charges that she later dropped. Neither of us can afford litigation or the attorney fees and we’re not really arguing over assets just custody and child support/alimony. We’ve yet to have any mediation sessions or sign an agreement out of court.

Most of me just wants to tell her “suck it up… these are the consequences of your actions… if you didn’t want to be inconvenienced you shouldn’t have tossed a grenade into the middle of our family to avoid accountability for your spending habits and lies”… or at the very least “custody is about what’s best for our kid not what’s convenient for you” but I don’t want to provoke more frivolous charges or vitriol… I just want my son to have a stable routine and live in a home with a parent who can provide for him instead of at a random stranger’s house with a parent who can’t even take care of herself without leeching off others.