I picked up my S's last evening, as usual. I stayed friendly, responded to W's queries with brevity, but did not engage any conversation with her myself, as I was gathering up the boys and loading my car to take them with me.
W tried to show me some figures she had been working with, and it represented a slight new line of thinking/feeling she is currently on.
A little background: Eight years ago, almost exactly, on Valentine's Day of 2000, we moved into our house. A couple of months later we found out W was pregnant with S7. As a gift to ourselves and to our child, I decorated the nursery room with an elaborate mural painting, in the style of Trompe-l'oeil. It was a depiction of the Scottish highlands with Scottish terrier puppies running around -- not photorealistic exactly, but more like a living storybook. It took over four months to paint and was a labor of love for me to my wife and new family.
Four years later, W was pregnant with S3, and it was time to prepare another bedroom for S7 to move into to make way for his little brother. So I painted that room with yet another mural -- this time depicting mountains and forests and deserts with a Hot Wheels race-track theme. With S7's racing car bed, the room looked like it was in the middle of a Hot Wheels track about to race into a Loop-the-loop. (FYI, I mimicked the artistic style of the Hot Wheels Highway 35 movies.)
I poured a lot of time, energy and love into creating these works of art. I spent many a long night like Michelangelo or Da Vinci creating these masterpieces for my children' pleasure.
Last summer, when my wife was about to walk out the door and I volunteered to be the one to leave instead, rather than allow her to rip my S's from their home, W had been shocked at my sacrifice. Given her diminished opinion of myself, that I was so very cold and shallow in her jaded view, she thought I would not want to be parted with my works of art -- and assumed I would be intending to stay in the home myself. I told her then two things (1) neither of us could really afford to live in that home on our either of our individual incomes, and (2) that without my family for whom I created these works in the first, they were utterly meaningless to me. If we D, then the house would be sold and the murals would be gone from us. That is the cold, hard reality.
Fast forward to yesterday. W was showing me her recalculations -- and this is why: Apparently she had talked to a real estate agent and they had told her that the murals would have to be painted over in order to be able to make the house sellable.
So W is now trying to figure out some way that I can refinance the home in order to be able to afford to keep it. I looked at her figures, but said very little. W is grasping now. I quietly told her in the end that it was not going to work, that there was nothing we could do. We then dropped the subject so I could continue loading up my car.
I know what's going through W's mind. It is finally dawning on her some of the cost of her much-sought-after D. The house will have to be sold. And in order to be able to do so, those labors of love that are so dear to me and my children will have to be painted over. I knew that already -- W has been in denial apparently.
W is seriously worried how this is going to look to our S's. Only now is she beginning to anticipate the reaction our two small boys are going have upon seeing the blank walls of their rooms. Again, W is more concerned for the guilt she's going to feel for taking away so many things that our S's love than for what this will do to me. She doesn't want to feel the consequences of her decisions, or to appear to be the "bad guy".
Well, sorry, but it's her bed and she can lie in it. If we D then she will have to face our S's, now and in the future -- and I will not insulate her from that, as it will no longer be my duty to do so.
