Suddenly, a small ray of hope

[built4speed]

You might be right. There is too much noise in my sitch (and therefore, in my head) to really be able to figure out what will happen to her after the D. The plan is we're both on our own and get on with our own lives, as much as possible while sharing three kids. I was hoping she wouldn't start using the kids, but that hope is fading.

Will she ever figure out she threw away a good thing? At this point it doesn't feel like it. She is all about getting rid of me, not seeing anything good. I get things like "I never respected you" or "I was never attracted to you." The one thing I do know is that once she gets into it with someone else, virtually all of her issues will come out again, and this time with someone less devoted. I mean, they won't have three kids and over 20 years of time invested. And for guys (so I hear) the demographics are such that you don't need to put up with this kind of crap - there are plenty of gals looking. So, who know hows it will work out for her. You might be right, she'll regret her decision - but it doesn't feel like that now.

I know I have issues to work through yet (mostly like: how do I pick a better mate - and be better with her - next time?), and my C is helping. But alot of our time is spent dealing with the W interactions, and making sure I don't get sucked into her psychoses (psychosis's?). I am done trying to convince her that her assumptions about things are wrong. I have been "responsible" for that for over 20 years.

I know that stopping doing it (talking her out of the tress, as I call it) will 1) be hard for me to not to respond to her outrageous statements, and 2) cause her to act out and treat me badly, because she actually believes she's right, and acts on it - but I need to ignore that behavior. This thing with the kids is just the first example - I have plans for Friday night, and W's assumption is that it's a date, so she withdrew her time covering the kids for me. I just set up a babysitter and moved on. I'm not giving her a hard time; I'm not trying to explain she is wrong; I'm not acting out and going to screw her over when she needs help with the kids. Did I in a small way cause this? Well, I wrote on the calendar "busy" instead of what I am doing. My C says I'm poking W a little bit, but way less in general than he sees in most of his clients Ds. Did I have a twinkle in my eye when I wrote that on there? Maybe. He says I wouldn't be human if I didn't mess with her a little. But that is pretty dang little. So I'm just letting her be paranoid and living my life. And she gets to live hers. It's what she wants and I hope she, chokes... umm, I hope she finds what she is looking for without me around.