Mom Says Her Ex Planned for His Girlfriend to Meet Their Kids and Move in Two Weeks Later, Then the Girlfriend Messaged Her Directly and They Met and Talked for About Two Hours

Marissa, who posts on TikTok as @marissamae96, is sitting in her parked car with her hands clasped over the steering wheel, about to walk into a meeting with her ex husband’s girlfriend. “I’m about to do something a little bit nerve wracking,” she says. “I’m feeling so much anxiety right now and I need to talk about it.”

The video, posted September 18 under the on screen title “Coparenting Chronicles” and the line “ex husbands gf is meeting the kids and moving in,” runs just under three minutes. It covers the message that set her off, the reply she did not get, the one she did, and what happened when she came back out to the car.

According to Marissa, it began a couple of days earlier. “I got a notification from the kids dad that him and his girlfriend will be moving in together,” she says. “Along with that message, he said that she will be meeting my kids very soon before they move in together.”

She says the introduction itself was not the problem. By her account, she and her ex have a rule about new partners: “We legally have like a six month rule where you can’t introduce a new partner until you have been together for six months.” What stopped her was the calendar. “I noticed that the two dates were two weeks apart,” she says.

She lists the questions that went through her head. “Does this person know what it’s like to live with kids? Are they going to meet my kids, move in with my kids, and then immediately give up?” Her concern, she says, was her children being asked “to meet and then immediately move.”

She is careful to say what the objection is not. “This has nothing to do with my feelings of him being with someone,” she says. “I’ve never cared that he’s had a girlfriend.” Her caution starts, she says, “when it involves my children.” Her caption makes the same point: “I hope you see where my heart is and what I care about: my boys,” followed by “the timeline didn’t feel right to me.”

Marissa says she raised it with her ex “and he didn’t respond.” The reply came from somewhere else. “And then I get a DM from her,” she says, from a private account she did not recognize at first. A screenshot of the message appears on screen. In it the girlfriend says she wanted to reach out on her own, would love to meet Marissa, with or without the boys, and wants full transparency before the changes happen.

“Very respectful. Immediately calmed my nerves,” Marissa says. “This person is willing to hear me out, to listen. If this is possibly gonna be a stepmom to my children, if you’re gonna come at it like that, that’s what I respect.”

Two days on, she is in the parking lot, admitting the nerves only arrived at the last moment. “I didn’t feel, like, true anxiety until, like, 10 minutes ago,” she says, describing herself as “shaky and weak” before heading in.

The last section is filmed after she is back in the car. “We spoke for about two hours, and if you can tell by my face, it went good. It went really good,” she says. “We are besties now. We got along really great.” She says the two of them had “great communication” and gives her reason for the verdict: “She is so open and willing to do what’s best for the kids, and that’s what I care about. She was great. 10 out of ten.”

How She Handled an Introduction Timeline She Did Not Like

Her complaint was narrow. She did not object to the girlfriend or to the kids meeting her. She objected to two weeks between the first meeting and the move, and she could say why: the children would meet someone and then be living with her almost at once. A coparent raising a similar concern can do the same and name the gap and the dates instead of saying the whole plan feels wrong.

She also knew what her own arrangement said. She cites a six month rule on introducing partners. Before sending a message like hers, reread your parenting plan so you know whether you are pointing to a term you both agreed to or asking for a courtesy.

When the girlfriend wrote to her, three things in that message made a meeting possible: it came from the girlfriend herself, it offered to meet with or without the children, and it put transparency ahead of the move. If a message like that arrives, a first meeting without the kids, in a public place, keeps it between the adults.

Go in with questions written down. Hers are a ready list: whether the new partner has lived with children, what the first meeting with the kids will look like, and what happens between that meeting and moving day. Add the practical ones, such as how the two of you will reach each other directly.

Leave room in the day. Their talk ran about two hours. And judge it afterward by the reason Marissa gave for her score, which was whether the other adult was “open and willing to do what’s best for the kids.”