I go away for a few days and you all lock up my thread... Thanks.. no really thanks... a lot of good stuff there that I plan on responding to when time permits.
I beleive June 22nd 9am is our provisional court hearing for the dissolution of our M. I have no idea what to expect in all of this or what my future holds for me... Taking it one day at a time.
We still have counseling setup for tomorrow and I'm still unsure what my W goal is for including me in it.
Have a little time now. But will try to respond to everyone's post tomorrow.
This weekend camping was a blast with my girls. Friday we basically got to the site and set everything up. I should also mention that I brought the puppy along at my 5D request. Saturday we where up bright and early, I made breakfast and then we where off to the waterpark/amusement park. We where there all day. Our night did not end until 10:30pm. All of us where exhausted by the end of the night. This morning we went out for donuts and then a little fishing. We got skunked(did not catch anything) but we still had a goodtime. My wife called a few times this weekend while we where away, all of which where to talk to our girls. Except for one conversation she had a 3 year old in the ER that coded and she was having a hard time with it. So she called me to tell me to keep a close eye on our girls. I assured her they were in good hands and that we would call later to say good night. Once back at the camp site I called her cell and left a VM saying that I sounded like she had a rough night and if she needed to talk or talk to the girls to just call. Once home I unpacked everything and washed my truck while 2D sledpt and 5D went swimming at a neighbors house. Tonight I went to my parents for dinner and while there I recieved and angry W phone call. She asked me NOW WHERE ARE YOU AT. I told her that I was at my parents and why the concern. She said that she just needed to know how to get ahold of her babies. Not a whole lot of logic in that comment but I let it go and handed the phone off to my girls.....
Alright enough about my day to day. This weekend I started reading the NUTS book that FIB recommended. I did not read as much as I would have liked, but, read enough to know that I have compromised who I am for sometime in my M. I always made my decisions based off of how they would effect my W. Basically I was afraid of her and did not even know it. I plan on writing out what my NUTS are so I can start living by them.
FIB... For whatever reason your tag line strength and honor was on my mind this weekend. What is strength? What is honor? Tomorrow I will try to post my thoughts around those two questions and how I see them fitting into my life.
We are still going to counseling tomorrow and hopefully we can have break through of sorts while there. I am not looking for to big of a drastic change but maybe a commitment to another session.
It sounds like things are becoming easier for you. Good luck on the counseling tommorow and remember that even if nothing positive comes out of it, you will still be okay.
I told her that we differ on a definition of what is family....to me.it's nuclear with two loving parents under one roof. She thinks it will be hunkdory if she splits, we're still family...even her L said that if she seps, "nothing changes". Bah humbug.
I agree with your definition of family. My W also feels that not much will change being divorced. She is planning out her new life much like her current, accept I am nolonger married to her. Rightnow the only way that my W is going to get a reality check is when we are finally apart and she can nolonger lean on me.
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As for the doc thing...let it go. I'm a surgeon...I get called out in the middle of the night...have to stress out seeing a Tball game and seeing a patient....the doctor shadow thing, etc. And forget the money thing. We're getting slammed with malpractice premiums.
I realize that life with this Doc is not going to be all that and have for the most part dropped the thoughts and feeling of this jerk being with my W. The hard thing is that he is the Pink Elephant in every interaction with my W.
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But ya wanna know something Em? What is life? What is this agreement that we all entered into? It's part of the game. You put your helmet on, dug in your cleats and you're still playing. They choose to run.
I agree we are the ones standing for what is right and playing the game even though it looks like we are getting slaughtered. We are the ones that are staying to our commitment no matter what the outcome of the game. Our S's are like the whining kid on the playground who complains...complains until he either quits or the other team lets him play on their side. This is the easy way out. This is truely running away. This is not who I want to be.
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Are they horrible people? No. Are they 'sick'? I don't think so..perhaps SOME are literally clinically depressed and making poor decisions. Did WE make a poor choice? Perhaps.
I agree 100%. At one point I thought my W turned evil or something along that line. She is not. She is actually a very caring and compasionette person that unfortunately for me was taken by some dude she works with. Does that make her horrible? No Does that make her human? absolutely. She has fallen into the same footsteps that a lot of people before her have. Heck she is following her fathers lead. Except he never left my MIL. Maybe I did make a poor choice in selecting my W. But that does not excuse me from the commitment that I made to her and God. I took my vows and meant to keep them no matter what life threw at me and us. My W on the other hand is looking for the easy way out.
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4kids on my thread talks about not doing yourself in with guilt and resentment. If.....IF...we chose wrongly, or, missed signs, how much do you blame yourself for it? How much do you learn from it and say...hell, I've learned and it's part of my history?
Did I miss signs? absolutely. Hindsite is 20/20. I know that I cannot beat myself up for what has already occured, I can only control what happens to me/my girls in the future.
Now for some of my thoughts on your tag line.
What is strength? Some would say that strength is physical. How strong is one, how far can they run, how far can one push themselves physically. I think most people measure strength this way. Sure this is one measure of strength, but real is only a small part of the equation. Strength to me is knowing who you are and sticking with that man no matter the circumstance. I haven't had much strength with my W over the years and have compromised myself to the point where I lost myself. Strength rightnow for me is finding out who that man is and not compromising him in anyway. What is honor? Most people honor war hero's, fireman, policeman, etc... They do amazing work for all of us and they should be honored for it. Honor like strength is more then just paying tribute to hero's. You honor youself, family, friends, work and God by knowing who you are and sticking to it. Honor is living a life with morals and integrity. Honor is not compromising your integrity.
That is a little about what strength and honor are to me. I had a lot more go through my head this weekend and should have wrote it down, hopefully I captured some of it here and it makes sense.
Thanks for your post. There is a lot to think about there. As for backing off. I have for the most part. I do not bring up R conversations anymore, but I do backslide when she brings them up. Today we are going to counseling and we are going to be talking about our R(I think), I plan on not telling her she is wrong and just validating her feelings. I'm also going to stop being afraid of how she is going to react to what I say or do. I cannot live that way going forward with or without her. Today is a good day to start this.
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I have noticed some people want the WAS back IN PART b/c they don't like losing and let's face it, it hurts like hell. But then, when the WAS wants back in and the LBS really lets all the acts of the WAS sink in, the LBSer decides he doesn't want the WAS back. So I guess you need to really assess whether you DO want your WAS back knowing what you now know about them. If you really see this episode as an aberration in your W, then don't analyze so much b/c if this is OUT of character, why bother trying to figure it all out? Just ignore everything she says, and half of what she does.
My W hasn't wanted back into the R in the past 6 months, so I haven't been forced to deal with these feelings/emotions. Hopefully I will. To be honest this sitch I would say is an annomoly for my W character. It is totally out of character for her and really has burned up the moral person that she really is. She is only human, so at this point I would say that I wouldn't hold it againest her. Rightnow, unfortunately I probably will be not holding it againest her apart from her being my W.
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Here's food for thought. I love my h, but since his MLC I can now see that he has a very selfish streak in him. And all the usual questions about whether I was blind, in denial, or even caused his behavior, come up. And we all do have roles in our situations, today. I find It's weird to see my h in this light, but I am trying on some new attitudes.
I to love my W, but am now seeing sides of her that I just ignored because I loved her. I ignored it because I just thought that was how she was and lets make the best of it. I did not realize in trying to appease her that I would lose myself, my dreams in the process. This is what happened. Now that I am more aware am I going to continue to ignore traits that I dislike? Probably but I will not compromise myself and lose myself ever again. We are all human and have things about us that are not so appealing. I will not hold that over anybodies head. But I won't let that stop me from being me, which is what I did for so long. I also have to be careful and not doing things out of spite for my W. I will probably have to ask myself is this me or am I just doing this to prove some point that does nobody any good.
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I hope it's the latter. I'm giving my M another shot and that is despite lots of misgivings, and lots of going back and forth. And forgiveness is a great concept but it takes much longer than i expected, and I actually want to forgive.
Good for you! This is a tough road and I believe that the road to reconciliation is different but just as hard. You, I and everyone else on this board has been wronged in many ways by our S's. It takes an awesome ammount of personally courage and strengh to forgive. I commend you for going down that path.
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So you know, as an LBSer, be prepared to have many mixed feelings if your WAS wants back in. it isn't all joy on your end and it isn't all remorse on their end. In fact, the WAS may not seem totally interested in making it ALL up to you, though they do at first. But when they first return, or signal their desire to do so, They seem to do one of two approaches: either they go over the top with their regret, so much so that it's almost a bit indulgent, and they beat themselves up until the LBSer (!!?) comforts them to make THEM feel better....
OR, they say they're sorry and they mean it, but after a relatively short time, they want to move forward all fresh. Sort of as if they were simply mistaken, or did a bad thing but more or less they expect forgiveness. Don't assume it's easy for them to ask for it, or to admit they've handled very important things in their life, really badly. And to some extent, at least for now, I think we have to accept that. I do know that the the returning WAS has to know we won't hold this over their heads forever. There has to be an end in sight for them to finally feel that they can start over with US, or they'll want to start over with someone else, if you kwim... Just food for thought.
I have actually thought about both of these and would love for either one to occur, I just don't see that happening rightnow.
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I think the last words of her book said, we have to "learn to embrace the ambiguity" and that seems like a good idea to me. Be here now. Especially for our children, we have to be fully present, today. Their childhoods seem shorter than mine did, and I know their years with me went by in a blink. So I'm working on dong this: embrace the ambiguity b/c it exists regardless, and live today as well as I can.
Just getting back from counseling with my W. It went better then I anticipated, but there was no break through moments. We where able to talk and actually laughed together outside the C office on our way out.
As for our session. I learned a little bit more about how I have not meet my W emotional needs. Basically when she has brought up pains/emotions/just trying to connect I came across as brushing them off, trying to fix them and sweeping them under the rug. She gave an example with my 5D the other day. She went next store to play with friends and got her feelings hurt. My 5D came to me and I comforted her and then diverted her attention. My W mentioned that she was still hurt and that I never really dealt with that hurt I just tried to move on and ignore. It is not that I tried to ignore my D needs I just did not see any good coming from me going next door to yell at her friends. I comforted my 5D and tryed to show her that her feelings where OK. Ladies please tell me what I should have done differently? Should I have walked her over to her friends and talk to them or was comforting her and diverting her attention onto something else OK. Her counseler told us that we are the only two that can heal each other. This pain/hurt that we both have can only be addressed by the two of us working together. She also talked alot about Eph 5:25 Love and respect. She told us no matter what we need to love and respect each other, even when we are not together. I found it interesting with a D hanging over our heads that she kept saying that we are the only two that can make each other whole/healed again. We talked a bit about our girls and how we should handle our sitch with them. C also said that it is up to us to raise our girls in a healthy home(not homes). I am not sure if her counsler is trying to get my W to see that we can be M and in a loving relationship or even divorced we can provide this stability to our girls lives. Not really sure, the message wasn't really clear. C also told us that throughout our M that my W and I where like two ships passing in the night. We both had the best intentions on making this M work we just did not have the education/skills on making that happen. She said if we did counseling earlier in our M we most likely would not be in the place that we are in today. She also mention another passage from Eph talking about having no unwholesome talk coming from the two of us and that we needed to use uplifting words to each other.
We are going back next week together, which is what I was hoping for. My next hope is for another session after that and so on... We will see. She is my W C and my W can pull the plug at anytime if she see's fit.
Another thing that I learned is that the papers that my W filed are up on mySpace. I guess one of her highschool girls found it online and posted it on her mySpace page. I had no idea this happened.
Also, our court date might not occur. We both think that through our dissolution that everything should for the most part stay status quo. So I have no problems signing off on that. I see my L on wednesday and have a few custody questions that I would like addressed. Other then that I am doing well.
Another thing that I learned is that the papers that my W filed are up on mySpace. I guess one of her highschool girls found it online and posted it on her mySpace page. I had no idea this happened
WTH???
MySpace is EVIL!!! Well, that's how my whole sitch started. H was talking about how hot OW was...blah blah blah...can I just tell you, this chick is not that hot...she's just got a good voice and sings for their band. She doesn't even have a good stage presence, she just stands there, soooo boring, but she can sing so guys love her. Eck!!! I feel for you! This is total BS, how dare they.
On a happier note!!! I'm glad she agreed to see C with you. It's good that it's her C too, then she can't tell you that your C is trying to persuade her in a direction she doesn't want to go. This is a C she trusts, that's so important.
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We both had the best intentions on making this M work we just did not have the education/skills on making that happen
I really hope your W heard these very important words! At the very least, they are in her memory banks if she didn't quite hear them today UB
Last night while trying to go to sleep my W came downstairs to the family room(this is where I sleep now) and wanted to talk about something I said earlier. I mentioned to her on the way out of counseling that I was seeing my L on Wednesday and that I had some questions on custody. I left it at that and we started to talk about my W work schedule for the week, our kids, etc... I guess this comment really bothered her and she needed to know what my intentions where.
I told her(not really a big deal). She then told me what she was expecting when it comes to our kids and custody. Schedule is something like this: - Every other weekend - Thursday night and all day Friday (every week) - Tuesdays have the girls for dinner. - Holidays and vacation where not discussed but we mentioned that we would need to work that out between the two of us.
She also told me that she does not want to touch my 401k. She basically sounds like she wants me to buy her out of the house and pay her some child support. If this is truely her intentions there is not much for me to fight for. This seems more then fair. I still would like to prolong the D process a bit to give C a chance to give my W a change of heart. A change of heart may never occur. Maybe letting her go quickly and quietly might be what is best. It still bothers me that she has made this decision while still talking to OM. All the points that she is making IMO are cloudy because of this EA. I cannot tell her this but I would like for her to realize this on her own. Unfortunately I did not get a chance to mention in C that I feel the A is still going on. There is always next week and hopefully the week after that.....
I'm glad she agreed to see C with you. It's good that it's her C too, then she can't tell you that your C is trying to persuade her in a direction she doesn't want to go. This is a C she trusts, that's so important.