A father with two weekends a month and a lake house full of kids learned mid-fishing-trip that a stranger’s failure to show up for dinner is, apparently, a co-parenting emergency

Two weekends a month is not a lot of parenting time. It works out to roughly four days if everything goes according to plan and nobody calls mid-fishing trip to renegotiate. A 43-year-old father in the middle of a custody dispute was on a lake with his kids, boats, and tubes, and the whole deal, when his ex-wife called to say she was having a hard day and could really use them back for the rest of the weekend.

The actual reason came out gradually. A date had ghosted her that evening. Not a family emergency, not a health situation, not anything that shows up in a custody agreement as grounds for early return. A guy did not show up, she felt bad about it, and her solution was to reach into her ex-husband’s limited parenting time and borrow some children for emotional support.

Now I’m not a divorced dad. For that matter, I’m not divorced because I’m not even married, and I’m not a divorced parent because, well, you know, I don’t have any kids, and I’m not even married. But in order to understand why his ex-wife’s behavior here is unhinged, you don’t need to be any of that. You need a pair of eyes and internet access to see the story the divorced dad shared on one of Reddit’s well-known communities, where people go to ask if they’re the A… Ahem hole.