She doesn't even want to spend one day a week with him. He has a live-in partner who is ill and who has zero relationship with this girl. Believe me, he doesn't want Ella full-time. It would blow up. That would be an untenable situation for all parties. He wants a normal co-parenting relationship, but that isn't going to happen with Alice as his ex-wife. Ella is getting close to the age when she will refuse to see him and it won't be forced anymore.
It shocks me how much she does not seem to love her father, but it is getting harder and harder for me not to come to that conclusion. I get that she has a lot of anger towards her dad and it takes time to work through. I get that having some third party there on their visits observing feels intrusive and is awkward, especially to a teenager already going through a lot hormonally which affects your moods, and it doesn't lend to developing close, bonding moments when he is with Ella. I get why he has the third party, though.
But her behavior towards her father goes so much deeper and further than that. She has become an extension of Alice: the hysteria, the tantrums, the out-of-control anger, the manipulation. It is very clear it was planned that Elsie wouldn't have her leotard with her. That whole paragraph says it all about the manipulation that was going on by Ella and Alice.
"Elsie had forgotten her leotard, so I suggested multiple times that we could go back to our apartment which was a 10-minute drive away, since the dance class was still an hour away. The Respondent refused and drove us to The Grove. The Respondent insisted we get a new leotard. I was overwhelmed by the number of people at The Grove, so I went back into the car. I told him to please leave me in the car and he could go get Elsie a leotard. The Respondent told me that he couldn't leave me alone in the car, so I would have to stay with his psychologist fiiend in the car. I had never met this man before, and he is approximately late 70 to 80 year old. I texted my mother because I started to have a panic attack."
Obviously, the plan all along was to get him to drive to her mom's apartment. "The respondent refused." He's your father. He's not your fucking subordinate or hired lackey. He's your father. You aren't the mother of Elsie. Elsie is his child and he was handling the situation with the leotard as the father, just not to your liking (nor Alice's). Plan thwarted.
Ella can't handle The Grove? She wants to stay in the car alone, and because he won't allow that, she has a panic attack? WTF? The histrionics all come from Alice's behavior. Ella is modeling it, sadly. And then little Elsie has a panic attack also? She had one because Ella was creating a scene and drama. It's clear little Elsie has become Ella's pawn in this game, just like Ella became Alice's pawn in her vendetta against Ioan.
