First, a little hateku:

You fucking liar.
Even your kid knows the truth.
Who's parenting whom?

And now, the story of my asshat third ex.

The Artist comes and takes the Baby Goddess out to dinner on Wednesdays. When I say "out to dinner," I mean to Burger King for chicken nuggets and french fries. And soda. Always soda. We noticed early on that she would come back from dinner with daddy and she would be so wound up that she would be unable to get to sleep until 10:30 or 11:00, hours after her normal bedtime. And come morning, she'd be cranky and impossible. We asked him not to give her soda with caffeine so that she would be able to calm down by the end of her bath.

Last Wednesday, she was buzzing like a cappucino hummingbird, running around the bathtub so fast that she wasn't even getting wet, and pirateguillermo asked her what she'd had for dinner.

"Chicken nuggets and french fries. And lemonade, except that it was Dr. Pepper. Daddy told me not to tell my parents."

pirateguillermo was understandably furious. He wanted to blast The Artist for many things, such as the fact that he adjusted his child support, claiming poverty, and then "forgot" to tell us for nearly three months that he had gotten another job, and that he's started becoming very demanding about what gets sent over to his house when she visits. He can't seem to keep a pair of pajamas or an extra pair of underpants for her.

So when The Artist came to pick the Baby Goddess up last night, I took him into the kitchen and told him the story of what had happened the Wednesday before. His eyes went wide and he vehemently denied having done any such thing. What a terrible thing to do! So I brought the Baby Goddess into the kitchen and told her that she was in trouble for lying to me, and that telling lies that get someone else in trouble is a particularly evil thing to do (I know, about as subtle as an elephant on the lawn, but still...). She was very worried and anxious. We've talked about the importance of telling the truth many times, and she knows that Mommy is particularly unhappy about people who lie.

Sure enough, when The Artist brought her back a couple of hours later, he looked very nervous.
"I want to tell the both of you something that [Baby Goddess] and I talked about at dinner," he said.
"Daddy is so busted!" she said, nodding.
"I didn't tell you the whole truth earlier," he said, starting to stutter. I raised one eyebrow. "Well, he said. Really I lied."

Shock. Surprise. Horror. Really.

"I did give her Dr. Pepper and tell her not to tell you," he said, and then looking at her,"but asking her to lie to Mommy was wrong. If I'm making her lie to you then I'm doing something wrong." I wonder, did she have to tell him that, or did he figure it out by himself?

"Yeah, daddy. You're so busted but I love you anyway," Baby Goddess said, patting his face. He's lucky. At that moment, his child was serving as a human shield.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to smack him and send him to his room. I wanted to shout for joy at the fact that I dumped him in part because he was a chronic liar and it's nice to know that I was right and he hasn't changed even one little bit. I wanted to rub his nose in what he's doing to his kid, showing her that it's okay to do things wrong, as long as nobody finds out about it. That's bullshit.

What I ended up doing is sending him a message saying "Now that you're employed again, your child support is back to what it used to be, starting this month." I figure I can put the extra money into savings for her future therapy.

I think if I had read this article and had a contract with him instead of marrying him, things would never have turned out like this. Then again, I probably wouldn't have the Baby Goddess.