'AITA for cutting my ex-wife’s vacation short with the kids?' UPDATED 2X

"AITA for cutting my ex-wife’s vacation short with the kids?"

I 40M divorced my wife 37F about 3 years ago. We have two awesome kids 6f and 4m, and I am so grateful to her for blessing me with them. We have 50/50 custody.

Brief history. My ex suffers from BPD and OCPD. This made her very difficult to live with. Prior to our divorce, I was constantly made to feel guilty for pursing any self care on “her time.” Days of the silent treatment was my norm. I called it emotional purgatory. She was a SAHM.

I desperately tried to complete small tasks to lessen the load at home and put my dad hat on the second I walked through the door. I put the kids to bed, washed bottles, cleaned the kitchen etc. she was always focusing on what I didn’t help with. I begged her to go talk to a therapist and see if medication might be appropriate.

I did convince her to come to marriage counseling which we attempted for about 6 months. In those sessions, it became clear that my feelings weren’t going to be heard or considered. I decided to just work on myself and my codependency.

I began to work on self-esteem, setting boundaries and not questioning my reality and my feelings. The healthier I got, seemingly the worse she got, which might sound strange to some. The night it all came undone I was watching a Playoff game outside on the patio. It was a Tuesday night. I had told her in advance that the game was important to me. I got the kids down and began watching the game.

She came outside and asked if I could help her pick up arround the house. We had someone coming to help with cleaning on Friday so she wanted to tidy up. I told her, “I can’t help tonight because I’m watching the game, but I could help tomorrow.” She slammed the patio door, came back out while the game was in OT and unplugged the TV. I walked out of the house and finished the game on my phone.

After that she asked me to go to a hotel and locked me out of the house. When I asked to come back she told me to get an apartment, which I did. A week later, she begged me to come back. I said okay but under the advice of my therapist, I was going to keep my apartment in case she changed her mind. Over the next month she became obsessed with me breaking my lease.

Eventually, I had a moment where I knew I was done trying. The divorce process was messy. She faked a pregnancy and tried to prevent me from getting 50/50. The truth came out and she caved eventually. At times I considered fighting for full custody but I know the kids love their mom and it would have broken her.

If you made it this far, thank you for your patience. On to the present issue…. Our decree states that we alternate Spring breaks. The ex took the kids out of state the last two years. She asked me in February if she could take them again this year. I agreed because I didn’t have plans, and I feel it’s important that they see family. She told me she was driving, so I agreed to more time to allow them to safely travel.

I made one request; “Please do not take the children to see my mother.” She has done this the last two times she traveled there. I don’t talk to my mother because she stole 60K from my grandmother (among other things) and refused to even acknowledge her fault. I now care for my grandmother and moved her here.

This morning my daughter informed me that they are flying, not driving and that ex has planned a visit with my mother and the kids. Since the divorce, There has been a very consistent pattern of her intentionally disregarding simple and reasonable requests, I’ll spare you other examples. The point is I’m fed up.

She is flying tomorrow. I asked her to change her flight and return the children to me by Wednesday at 5pm. This cuts her trip short three days, but follows the order. So I feel a bit guilty because I know the children will be disappointed. Logically and based off history, I know this is the only thing she responds to and I’m sick of being taken advantage of.

What are your thoughts. I’m open to hearing that I’m being unreasonable if you feel that’s the case. I desperately want to just do what’s best for the kids, but this is often in conflict with enabling toxic behavior and her disregarding simple boundaries. Thank you for taking the time to read this. 🙏🏼

Here's what people had to say to OP:

BigNathaniel69 said:

NTA, she wanted to play games so you enforced the court order. Seems fine to me. But stop giving her these opportunities. Follow the court order. Stop giving her extra chances to cause issue, she doesn’t deserve them and she has repeatedly shown you that she will trump your boundaries. So stick to the boundaries backed by the court order.

countryboy1101 said:

NTA - I would have my attorney send her a letter restricting access to the kids by your mother. Tell her that she has again broken your trust and you will not be allowing it any longer. Next time it happens you will take her back to court for full custody.

Powerful_Pie_7924 said:

I don’t think you're an @$$hole for this you set up a boundary and your ex completely seam rolled you BUT please plan something super fun for the kids for when they get to you don’t punish them cuz of this event I’m sure they were looking forward to the vacation so please have something ready before you pick them up

Bolt_McHardsteel asked:

What was her response to your request to return them by Wednesday? You gave her more time based on lies she told you, so when you learned about the lies you withdrew the offer of additional time. Cause and effect. Be very clear with her on that. Hang in there.

And OP responded:

Verbatim… “You trusted me as a stay at home mom for years. You trusted me with the kids full time after we separated. You trusted my mom to care for the kids for weeks and months the at a time while we worked. You’ve trusted my dad and sister with the care of the children.

So I am trying to understand what your safety concern is regarding our kids?Because this actually feels unnecessary, unhinged and not in the best interest of the kids since they have been looking forward to family dinners, get together, Easter celebrations and birthdays."

Four months later, OP shared this update:

I posted in April seeking guidance on if I should attempt to enforce an order to cut my wife's vacation short. Long story short she has a long history of lying and manipulating situations to gain time and access to the kids. After processing all the comments, I realized while I may not be the AH, I am the problem.

It was my flexibility with my ex that was enabling and emboldening her behavior. Religiously sticking to the order has been my mantra ever since. I am grateful for the tough love in the comments which truly helped wake me up to the situation. Thank you again to all that contributed to the original post in the comments.

I did ask my ex to return the children on my scheduled parenting day. I told her that because she had lied about her travel plans, I needed her to bring the kids back early. Her response was to tell me how awful I was to do this to the children. The day came, I went to the pick spot and she didn't arrive.

She refused to answer my calls and texted me screenshots of me agreeing to give her the extra time and more guilt about my behavior and weaponizing the children etc. I tried to contact my family law attorney, but he was on vacation. I set up an appointment with him and contacted local law enforcement. The police were not interested in my call.

They told me it was a civil matter and that I needed to contact the court and judge that created the order. I felt a combination of anger and helplessness. If anyone has ever coparented with someone with personality issues, you know exactly what feeling I am describing. I decided to take full responsibility for my role in the matter and use it moving forward.

Since April, I have followed the order and respectfully denied all of her requests for extra time and ignored the subsequent push back and guilt tripping that inevitably comes when she doesn't get what she wants.

I felt the need to update as a cautionary tale to others that are coparenting or considering leaving a partner with personality disorder/s and high conflict behavior. This month, my ex informed me that she married someone from the military. I suspect she had an affair with this person during our marriage but this is really irrelevant to this post.

She emailed me asking to relocate the children to a base literally across the country in a remote area where there are no direct flights and the travel time is over 10 hours. She has no family there and the move would take the kids from everything they know. She proposed a plan to make me the summer parent.

I respectfully shared my concerns and said that she could absolutely move, but that she would have to become the summer and holiday parent. Two weeks later she filed a motion to relocate with the court.

She hired and expensive law firm and stated in her motion that she was a victim of domestic violence, and that I was uninterested and uninvolved with the children and on several occasions I have "surrendered" my parenting time. She has weaponized my flexibility and genuine efforts to coparent.

I won't waste your time defending myself and will say that she never brought any DV up at any previous hearing, never any charges or police reports, and agreed to give me 50/50 parenting time. This, with the timing of her new marriage and the motion, speak volumes. At best our relationship was unhealthy and mutually toxic.

The reality is that I was being ab%$#d, which is the reason I filed for divorce in the first place. At times, I felt have felt so scared, angry, and helpless. More so than anytime in my life, and I have been to combat. It's not that I believe that she will be successful. Everyone I reach out to reassures me that this is a long shot.

It's the mere POSSIBiLITY that I could lose the kids and that they would have to spend so much more time with someone who is so emotionally damaging. It's been a challenge to stay grounded. I am having nightmares and difficulty falling and staying asleep due to the anxiety. There is something so gut wrenchingly cruel about having someone who abused you, accuse you of being the abuser.

I am preparing in all the ways legally, psychically, and emotionally to fight for my children. I have a very strong case and will show the judge how loved and cared for the children are at Dad's house. I will let my attorney try to communicate the issues with her behavior and subtly try to let the judge know who they are truly dealing with.5

I mostly wanted to express gratitude to everyone and share this as a cautionary tale to help others. If you are considering leaving or are coparenting with someone with a personality disorder please don't fall in to the trap I did. Keep your boundaries in place, stick to the order, and document high conflict behaviors so that you are prepared to protect yourself and your children.

If you believe in Prayer, I would appreciate them in any form. I will update again after the trial.

7 months later OP came back with this long and detailed update:

I want to start by saying thank you to everyone who has reached out with support. The messages, comments, and well-wishes have meant more than I can express. I’ve been avoiding updating this thread, not because I didn’t want to, but because it’s been too painful.

The custody relocation trial was brutal. My children's mother and her attorney went after my character hard. They showed a video in court from five years ago where I was begging her to get help. Hearing it played back, I can admit it was controlling.

I was trying to get us help and save our marriage. It was embarrassing.i should have left months before it got to that point. From that point on, I felt like the judge got tunnel vision.

"Why the Verdict is Wrong."

The judge ignored key evidence favoring stability of the kids. She acknowledged that my children had a strong family and community support system in Colorado Springs. She noted that I was a good parent and that the kids would be fine with either of us but claimed the law required her not to prejudice my ex’s move.

Despite my children's mother admitting on the stand that she would stay in Colorado if the judge ruled against her, the court still granted relocation.

The judge ruled that my children's mother encouraged a loving relationship between the kids and me, yet the evidence suggested otherwise. I testified and showed that she withheld the children during my parenting time, omitted medical appointments, and made unilateral decisions about their schooling.

The ruling failed to address these contradictions. The judge found that I exhibited "coercive control" based on one selectively chosen recording while failing to examine my ex's documented behaviors under the same legal standard. This is a clear imbalance in how the evidence was weighed.

My children's mother manipulated travel schedules, misrepresented plans, and attempted to dictate how and when I could see the children. She entered my home uninvited and attempted to rekindle our relationship post-separation despite my clear boundaries. Yet, none of this was factored into the ruling.

Another major oversight was the reality of military relocation. My children's mother is married to an active-duty service member, meaning they will likely move again in the coming years. I argued in court that if her husband is given new orders, my children should be allowed to return to Colorado.

The judge dismissed this concern entirely, effectively sentencing my children to the needs of the military, not their own best interests. I had six witnesses and 57 exhibits. We had time for seven exhibits and none of my witnesses got called.

I am still fighting, but I am also working on forgiveness. Even typing this update is difficult for me. Revisiting every painful detail keeps me stuck. I recently wrote a letter solely for my healing that I may share with local media, mostly to raise awareness about fathers' rights.

I have to forgive if i want to continue fighting. I think this letter better captures how I feel because I spent more time on it. Instead of reliving every painful moment here, I’m sharing that letter to save some emotional bandwidth.

"Here it is:"

**A Letter of Forgiveness to the Colorado Family Court System **

By Nicholas R. Fry, MSW, LCSW

Combat Veteran | Therapist | Owner, The Uncommon Heart

I never thought I would have to write a letter like this. After serving 15 months in combat as an infantryman in Iraq, where we kept death letters in our ballistic vests, I never imagined the hardest moment of my life would come not on a battlefield, but in a courtroom.

On January 2, 2025, after waiting anxiously for two weeks following the custody relocation trial, I sat in silence as Judge Hillary Gurney ruled in favor of a motion to relocate our children to Fort Drum, New York. 1,800 miles away from the only home they have ever known. They would be leaving behind their family, their support system, and their stability.

In that moment, my ability to be a consistent father in their lives was taken from me. Not because I was an unfit parent. Not because I lacked love, commitment, or stability. But because of a court system that does not always recognize fathers as equal, necessary, and irreplaceable.

Our marriage was a casualty of the pandemic. Quarantine strained our relationship beyond repair. My only regret is that I stayed too long, thinking we could repair things for the kids. We ultimately divorced. We had maintained a 50/50 custody arrangement. Co-parenting was challenging at times, and establishing new boundaries with my children's mother was even harder.

But we built a system that, while contentious at times, worked. Our children thrived in a community and environment where they had both parents equally in their lives. And in my home, they had loving new family members that blended and embraced them immediately.

I have spent my career helping people process emotional trauma, just as I had to in my own struggle with PTSD after coming home from Iraq in 2005. As one of the earliest OIF veterans, I struggled to find a therapist who truly understood what I had been through.

My solution was to become the person I was looking for at that time. I set out to heal myself, complete graduate school, and dedicate my life to helping wounded warriors transition and heal from combat trauma.

I called it post-traumatic growth, to turn something awful into a way to heal myself and help the Community. Today, we continue that mission through a group therapy practice that has helped thousands in the Pikes Peak region heal holistically from emotional trauma.

Yet nothing in my years of experiencing and studying trauma could have prepared me for the depth of pain, the helplessness, sadness, and pure devastation I felt the day I lost my children. It was the worst day of my life. It brought me to places darker than I had ever known—even darker than the flashbacks of war. Suicidal thoughts crept back in.

Alcohol became an escape and the only way to numb the pain. The man who was religiously at the gym at 5:00 AM every morning, regularly practicing yoga and meditation before starting with clients, was gone in an instant.

Soon after came the day I had to put my children on an airplane to their new home. I was ready to check out. Still, there was part of me that whispered that I couldn’t allow this to destroy me.

As I sat in court, the weight of the system pressing down on me, I could only say:

From the Transcript:

"I just... I don’t know how I’m supposed to have a fair trial here. I had ninety minutes to outline a fifteen-year relationship."

The judge’s response? She admitted she had no concerns about me as a parent. Yet she ruled against me. I pressed further:

"Your Honor, when it comes to an inevitable relocation again, what does that look like?"

"At this point, we don’t know what the future holds," she said.

That was it. That was the decision that uprooted my children, forced them into uncertainty, and turned them over to the needs of the military. I was left standing there, dumbfounded, devastated.

I argued, desperate for clarity:

"I mean, this is literally just signing them up to have to make new friends and move every three years for the rest of their lives until they’re old enough to make a decision to come back and live with their dad, which I have no doubt that they will do. I don’t understand how putting them at the whim of the military is in their best interest."

"Her husband is deployed, Your Honor. He’s in Iraq. She is there by herself. How is that a better environment than the one they have here? They have a whole family here. They have friends here. We live a block from their school. I can walk them there. And yet I had ninety minutes, there's a shot clock ticking in the courtroom to fight for them."

"And if, as hard as I’ve worked in my life to overcome adversity, a dad has no chance in this family court system. I’ve seen it over and over again. I’ve seen it with clients. I didn’t want to believe it was true, but now I know. I’m dumbfounded, and I’m devastated. My kids are my most important thing in the world."

As hard as this has been, through all of this, I realized that I have a choice.

I choose to forgive.

I forgive you, Judge Gurney, not because I agree with your ruling, but because I realize, like all of us, you are human and make mistakes. We all have unconscious biases and blind spots. I choose to forgive because carrying resentment will destroy me, and it certainly won’t serve my children.

I have seen the pain of alienated fathers enter my office many times. Men left devastated by the El Paso County family court system. I am also working to forgive my children's mother, because I understand that people act from fear, self-interest, and their own unprocessed pain. But forgiveness does not mean silence.

I must speak out because what happened to me is not just about my case.

It is about a broken family court system. One where fathers often have to fight uphill battles just to remain active, involved, and present in their children's lives.

In Colorado, and specifically El Paso County, severe court backlogs mean that life altering decisions are sometimes made in just 90 minutes—90 minutes to determine the fate of a father and two innocent children, 5 and 7 years old, who deserve more than rushed justice. How can a judge determine the "best interests of the child" in less time than it takes to watch a movie?

Even if I win my appeal (which I have strong grounds to do) the system offers no real second chance or due process. An appeal in Family court can take an entire year and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Ultimately, the case could be sent back for retrial to the same judge, who could simply rule the same way again with zero oversight or accountability.

All the advantages I had as a 50/50 parent now belong to my children's mother should the case be retried. The fight is long, extremely costly, and exhausting. Many fathers don’t even try because they know the odds are stacked against them and many lack the financial resources and emotional bandwidth to continue seeking justice from state sponsored trauma of losing your kids.

This letter is not just for me. It is for every father who has walked into a courtroom with hope, only to walk out with his heart shattered. It is for the men who have been told, directly or indirectly, that they are less important than mothers, that their role in their children's lives is somehow negotiable. For all the veterans who fought to protect a system that may one day take their children away.

I will never stop fighting for my children, but I will do so free from vengeance, hopelessness, and outrage. I will fight with forgiveness and I will move forward with my life regardless of the outcome.

Kennedy and Emerson, I hope you will always know that I fought for you. No matter how far away you are, I will always be your father.

I do not know what the future holds. But I do know this: I will not allow this to destroy me. I forgive you, Judge Gurney.

Nicholas R. Fry, LCSW

Combat Veteran | Therapist | Founder, The Uncommon Heart