Can I just say that I'm really fucking tired?

Today has included three 1:1 tutorials with students in difficult circumstances, two MA dissertation supervision sessions, and a lot of bullshit with my ex-husband. I get up at about 6.30 most days, so that I can get some exercise in before I start the day properly; otherwise I have learned this just doesn’t happen, so despite the fact that I am someone who needs a lot of sleep to function, I lever myself up, stick some earbuds in, and head to the treadmill armed with - at the moment - Tim Green, to whom I’ve been listening compulsively for a good few months now, or sometimes an episode of Bridgerton if I need to tell myself that it’s not really exercise so much as vegging while upright. Then I come in, wake up eldest childebeest and prompt her to drink some jump-start caffeinated coffee that counteracts to some degree the prescription melatonin she takes to help her sleep, and then go and prod the younger childebeest similarly (though without the melatonin; we’re still finding out the best route to an ADHD diagnosis for her having had a referral through her school rejected by the relevant team - what joy). After that it’s a military operation of breakfasts, vitamins, homework checks, ensuring things are in place and on mental radar for the school day, and then shuttling off to the nearest village where they can get the bus to school. Eldest childebeest normally spends Wednesday nights at her father’s place, and takes various pieces of kit with her to facilitate this. However, she slept really badly last night, and was cross-eyed this morning, so I asked her if she was going to be OK as she tends not to sleep well at her father’s place and also doesn’t enjoy hoiking the extra stuff with her into school. She replied that she had better go ‘because otherwise he’ll just be all ‘your mother is stealing you away!’’. I said she should let me worry about that and that she should just do whatever she needed to do, and if that was going, then fine, but equally if that was coming back here, then fine too and we would sort it out with her father. Initially, she said she would go, but a few seconds later said ‘oh stuff it - I want to come home’, or words to that effect, and we agreed that I would message him to that effect, with her following up after school, when she would have access to her phone.

Now, in reality, what this means is a series of increasingly accusatory texts from her father, telling me the many ways in which I get in the way of the girls’ relationship with him, how I’ve eroded his time with them over the years, how I influence them into such decisions, how it’s clearly me and not them, and why can’t they communicate directly with him? Nowhere in this does he ever acknowledge that any of his behaviour might have contributed to the situation in which he now finds himself. After nearly a decade of dealing with last-minute changes to plans, of him forgetting to collect one or other of them, or missing parents’ evenings, or not understanding the ramifications of being neurodiverse, or ignoring what they tell him, or forgetting things that are important to them, it is still clearly my fault that sometimes they don’t know how to go about talking to him. It is also my fault that they sometimes decide they simply can’t be bothered with the faff of going elsewhere, no matter how much they might like elsewhere (wherever it was), when they’re tired or unwell or just CBA in terms of people. And it is of course also my fault that the younger childebeest is anxious, and him not listening to what she needed him to hear in three rounds of mediation has nothing to do with her feeling that everything she undertakes is doomed to failure and there is no point in talking to people.

I sometimes just feel like I am stuck in the worst goundhog cycle of this bullshit. It doesn’t seem to matter what I say - or don’t: if I respond, the vitriol continues (and includes him badmouthing me and my extended family, such as it is, to both children); if I don’t respond, it makes no difference the next time and still it comes.

I know that the girls’ father is probably autistic; so many traits there so very clearly. I also know that being autistic doesn’t give you a right to be an arsehole who lives a consequence-free life, and yet that is what he seems to manage. It is never his fault. It is never he who is the common denominator in his failed marriage, difficult relationship with his youngest daughter, absent friendships, lost jobs, aggressive neighbours. And particularly from me he can’t hear a word of this. It’s unfair of me to ask him to contribute to the girls’ financial upkeep. It is unreasonable of me to say when one of them is tired and has asked to stay here. It is duplicitous and disgusting of me to have remarried. He is 44. We divorced when he was 35. It has been a long time. And I am tired.