Thanks NNP, I just ordered the Boundaries with Kids book and workbook. Hopefully they get here SOON! S had another morning clothing melt down. Luckily it's Saturday. After the timer had the opposite effect of calming him down and getting him to stop fighting with his clothing, I just put him back in his bed. He started to play with his sing along machine after a while and I decided to take it away and give him the choice of laying quietly until he falls back to sleep or getting himself dressed. He's got to learn how to get dressed in the morning without having a complete melt-down about his clothes. I don't know what else to do at this point.
On the H front...I actually had a night out with a couple older women who have become my mentors. I talked with them a lot about my situation and the choices I'm facing at work and whether or not to continue my M. I gave them the good, the bad and the ugly of the R. They didn't insist I either divorce H or commit to staying with him, but they were adamant about me not wasting these years of my life and thinking there wouldn't be another fish in the sea for me. They also agreed that I need to keep working on giving and recieving compliments. After dinner and a couple drinks I told them I was going to go home and write H an email acknowledging his good qualities that I had just described to these women.
Well this morning I got an email back from H saying, "What the hell is this all about? I do not have any good qualities nor do I desire to be judged by any. When are you going to figure this out? We don't agree on anything and never will. You obviously haven't told your group the truth about me..." I didn't really know how to react to that. My first reaction was that all too familiar sinking feeling, that he's not ever going to grow into a big enough human being to make this M work. His email did go on to say I should quit harping on myself because of my weight because I've always been attractive. And he said that because one of his good qualities that I wrote him about was that he had always been attracted to me for me and not what weight I happened to be at (I gained 100 pounds between getting married to him and having our son, then lost it over the following few years). I didn't think I was harping on myself, just being greatful that he wasn't like so many other men that would have had a hard time with the change in my body.
This is why (or one of the reasons) it's so hard for me to compliment him. My email to him was just a paragraph, highlighting what I thought were two of his best qualities. Now I'm afraid to go back and reread it because I'm embarassed I even wrote it to him in the first place. Maybe it was just too mushy and he thought it was insincere.
Screw him. I can't believe I spend this much energy on someone who got me into this situation anyway.
