I guess I'm a charity case

Had a phone conversation with XH that started out, I thought, quite benign and civil and left me in tears, (again.)

Through the course of our conversation I got the very clear picture that he feels that the alimony and child support that he is ordered to pay me is charity to "set me up for success." He's terribly afraid that at the end of the alimony payments I will have done nothing to try to support myself and he will be forced to make some "hard choices." Of course, he didn't elaborate as to what those "hard choices" would be, but in his true nature, there was a threatening undertone that he would never, ever admit to.

It's been a year since my divorce and my priorities have been to try to keep my children's lives as close to what they were prior to our divorce. I want to take care of them, be there for them, take them to school in the morning, pick them up when they are done, take care of them on the many, many days off from school that they have throughout the year, take them to piano lessons, soccer practice, basketball practice, softball practice, chess club, choir, and scrabble club, volunteer in their classrooms, and chaperone field trips (just to name a few...) XH says that doing those things for the children is "nothing special" and lots of parents do those things for their children all of the time.

My daughters have never spent one minute in daycare and I would like to avoid that for as long as I possibly can. Not that I think there is anything wrong with daycare, perse, but you mention the word to my children and they equate it to something similar to a concentration camp.
XH stated that the girls would be much better off if their mother was "self-sufficient" than if they had to be in daycare. He doesn't want me to need to "rely" on him (and his charity,) and that my being employed full time would better serve our children's best interest.

He makes it seem as if our divorce settlement, including my alimony payments, were something that he came up with out of the goodness of his heart. I'm sorry, if I understood the divorce laws correctly, every penny that I receive in alimony and child support is money that I am entitled to under the customary practices of the state of Oregon. Was I the only one sitting there in the lawyers office? I'm pretty sure he was sitting there with me but perhaps he was a figment of my imagination?????

He has such a knack for making me feel like a complete incompetent, incapable, stupid idiot who has my head so far up my ass that I can't see anything in front of me; he's so good at it. I suppose what I need to keep reminding myself is that he didn't value my role as a wife and a mother while we were married, why on earth would he value my role as a mother and primary caretaker/nurturer to our children now that we are divorced?

Before a million people give me crap for my allowing myself to get so upset about all of this, I will tell you that I completely refrained from discussing my point of view on most of the aforementioned items to him. It took everything inside of me to bite, (and I mean BITE,) my lip to stop myself from going ballistic and spouting off my talking points of why he was SO wrong. I calmly said, "I think that it is pointless for us to have this discussion," and he replied, "you're right...we just have different priorities."

Yes, that is true, and we always have;
which is why we're not married anymore.