Treese, Just had time for a quick scan of your thread--thanks for visiting mine! It's so hard to know what really 'worked' for me, and there are so many differences in our situations that I hate to just jump in with advice. I think the absolute hardest thing to do was detach, and it IS harder to do when you have constant contact, but ironically, that constant contact is a blessing, too, I think, because it does give them a chance to see changes in you. Probably the next most important thing for me to do was STOP TALKING to mutual friends and family. They just don't get it. And if they empathize with you, it is at his expense and makes reconciliaton harder in the long run. We don't socialize with many mutual friends any longer. I joined a divorce suppport group through meetup.com. It was more of a social group than the typical Divorce Care type of group and it helped immensely with my GAL. And this board at DB was more valuable than I can say. This is the place to truly vent, and to receive valuable advice instead of the "kick-'em-to-the-curb" you are more likely to hear from people you know. And find someplace in real life to meet new people, develop new interests and not necessarily focus on your marriage. I was lucky, I think, that the divorce group I joined was more social. I reached a point where I recognized the value from that group was the friendships and the activities and not so much the shared life experiences. Very few of them dealt with reconciling, so not much real life experience in common there.
I was also fortunate that we didn't have kids together, and our kids' respective parents are very active in their lives. We are not overly-involved step-parents and our roller coaster had little effect on them. I think the best you can do is remain as neutral as possible about your H when talking to your kids. Your Ds sound older, and sounds like they already know about the affair, correct? So it might not be inappropriate to try to do some damage control. One of the things I hate dealing with in real life is the "once a cheat, always a cheat" belief that is so prevalent in our society. One book helped me enormously in overcoming that belief in myself, and in defending my position to others...I'll have to find my copy to give you the reference and will try to do that before the day is over. It might even be helpful to recommend your older daughters read it--but read it yourself first and see what you think. It's been a while since I read it so please use your own judgement based on what your daughters know and what you think they can handle.
I didn't mean to write a book--see what you get for inviting me to stop by? :-)
Good luck to you--I'll try to check in with you again, but I'm honestly at a point where I don't spend a lot of time here anymore. Sometimes it's too much of a reminder of when things really, really sucked.
