Quote:
Originally Posted by onmyway
Her (talking to someone else about how my son is doing in school, while i'm standing right there) : He's come such a long way. The school is absolutely amazed at how much progress he's made since he's come to me, and they think it's because i put in so much effort to help him catch up. He's still not at grade level yet, but he's close, and he's improved dramatically from where he was (pause, glance in my direction, pause) before. And they absolutely credit it to my willingness to work diligently with him to help him learn.  |
I'm picturing at least four different issues kind of tangled up together here:
-- What's going to work best for the kids.
-- What a good job she seems to be doing and how impressed the school is with her efforts.
-- Competition and/or other unfinished business between her and you. She seems to be saying that 
she's doing better than you did.
-- How you're going to hold this and what you're going to learn from it. It wouldn't do anyone much good for you to decide, for instance, that she must be better than you at school stuff so you should just give up. Neither would it help much to decide that she's taking advantage of the kids to get back at you and has to be stopped at any cost.
I don't think either of you wants to use the kids as pawns nor prevent the other from doing whatever
is good for them. Even though this might look to you like letting her win, you may need to start by staying out of the way for a while, acknowledging whatever she's doing that does seem to be working, seeing (when you're ready) what you could do to help, and working up gradually to taking on more. If you were to pressure her to do something your way or to let you do more right now, she'd probably take it as a challenge and feel obligated to treat you as a threat. It sounds as if she could pretty easily frame the situation as what's good for you versus what's good for the kids, with her as the advocate for the kids. If you let her find out at her own pace that you're not really a threat to her and that you can both contribute to the kids' wellbeing, she might eventually have to choose between what helps
her feel better and what's good for the kids.
I could probably have used another week to think about this, but then there'd be the very real danger that I'd forget about it entirely. 