Leslie

You've made just as many assumptions.

scrubbedexpat099

Just wanted to say Happy Easter Monday.

Pulaski

I took what Pete H said at face value, you are assuming that he left out material facts.

Pete H seemed very clear, but I suppose could have missed critical information out. What he said was ".... When we got there my wife went right to him and told him 'You are creating a problem' ....".

In my mind the key wording is "When we got there my wife went right to him", apparently meaning she arrived, saw him, made a bee-line for him, and told him to leave, not stopping to talk to anyone, even her parents.

He didn't say " .....When we got there my in-laws were having problems with my wife's ex who had invited himself in, and my MIL asked my wife to deal with him. So my wife went right to him and told him "You are creating a problem' .... ". Maybe that's what he meant, but it certainly isn't what he said.

moneypenny20

And if he had I'm fairly sure everyone would have said 'good for her', how dare he' etc etc.

Pulaski

I am fairly sure you are correct.

dc koop

I would have taken him outside to the back yard, told him where the egg with the five bucks inside was hidden and then suggested he go buy himself a beer.

nun

So the ex dropped his daughter off at his ex-MIL's for Easter. How exactly was he creating a problem? The opinion of the MIL and FIL are required to make a judgement on this. I see no problem in an ex saying hello on Easter if they are there to drop off a child anyway, but if he had come in and was being objectionable in the opinion of the MIL and FIL then your wife was correct. But I got nothing in that line from your original post. You got there after the ex and he might just have been chatting to his daughter's grandparents......which seems like a good thing. In the end there's probably blame all round here. The ex stayed longer than needed to annoy your wife and your wife took the bait and was rude. The loser is the daughter seeing her parents argue.

Leslie

Morning, gorgeous. Just came back in here to say that.
I'll turn it back over to the smug self-righteous brigade.

scrubbedexpat099

Did go and see the new baby on Saturday, very noisy.

Leslie

You probably scared him.

Rete

Social etiquette would demand that the mil and/or fil be the one to tell the ex that the guest list was full and that there was no room at the table for him to join them.

Being that your wife intervened in place of her mom or dad, beggars the question as to why she felt it was her place to be the bouncer. Apparently, there is no love lost between the ex-husband and ex-wife and the ex-wife's family and the reasons why are unknown to those of us here.

Must be difficult to be the new husband who has been thrown into a family fraught with issues, i.e. the daughter choosing to leave her mother's home and new stepfather to live with her father and his girlfriend. That alone will make for ill feelings on the part of the mother and maternal grandparents.

Why are you questioning whether your wife's behavior was socially acceptable? Were her parents and perhaps her daughter upset with her intervention?

As a former divorced mother of two, I was fortunate that the ex and I got on fine with one another for the most part and any issues were dealt with outside the hearing of the kids. In fact, there were many times that he and my then fiancée spend time sitting around the table having coffee on a Saturday morning when he came to get the girls.

Hope that you all enjoyed the rest of Easter Sunday together.

Giantaxe

Imo, it's always the responsibility of the host to "evict" someone from a social gathering at their house, unless they specifically delegate the task to someone else. In this case, there's a really good reason why such delegation to the OP's wife would have been a poor idea anyway: why have the daughter's parents be seen in such an ugly situation in front of her? Much better to have the message come from the in-laws (if at all; it's not clear from the OP whether the in laws objected to his presence anyway).

Owen778

I just glanced through this thread. Most of the responses I find bizarre, and I doubt that any of you have given much thought to the dynamic in divorced families.

I have three step-children from my wife's previous marriage. I think it unlikely we'd have a problem, these days, but if we were in a similar situation, it would undoubtedly be my wife, not me or my mother-in-law, that had a quiet word with her ex-husband. She knows him much better than anyone else.

Pete, I don't have much advice, especially since we are the custodial parents, except, especially now this has happened, I recommend you only arrange handovers at neutral venues, or there and at home.

Pulaski

On the contrary, I gave a lot of thought, based on my observations of divorced families and the report of Pete H. My observational experience is that many (not all) divorced families are rather good at creating tension and not very good at diffusing it, and while, in this case, both parties contributed to the incident, staging a 1:1 confrontation in front of the family and children was probably not the best idea.
Except Pete H's wife didn't "have a quiet word", she told him he was "creating a problem", thereby enflaming the situation, and unsurprisingly causing her ex to resort to obscenities.

Owen778

Yes, if she didn't ask him to talk somewhere away from the daughter, that's a problem, I agree.

But then your objection was to Pete's wife being the one who spoke to him. That doesn't make any sense to me.