Mulesqb still getting kicked in the a$$

[mulesqb]

Indigo - Thanks for a great perspective on things. You are right - I am letting her call the shots and then complaining about it.

That's an interesting point about whether she feels she is a W or a roommate. I think her answer would be different almost every week. In our last serious talk she said she is tired of feeling the way she does and needs "to do this". What she meant was work on things at home. I have seen a bit of a difference since she said that - but just a bit, not even close to where the kids and I would want. So I don't know whether to be patient and see if we get continued progress - or try and force the issue. She has only been to 2 sessions with her new IC so far.

I also am following a lot of the MLC advice I have found and try to agree with a lot of the things she says - even though I don't. I do set boundaries with time spent with the neighbors. As mentioned sometimes she follows, sometimes she doesn't. It seems like she wants to work on the marriage at her own pace. Last night I was down because I got some bad news about my Dad. She seemed genuinely concerned and kept asking me what was wrong. But then went out shopping with the neighbor's W. I am going to start being tougher with her. This morning she asked if we could all go to breakfast tomorrow, so i was happy about that.

I am setting a new goal for her and I to go out on a date. I would feel a lot better about things if we could do something alone. The thing is that I want her to ask. I asked last week and she said no so I will not do it again. She also keeps putting her legs into my stomach in bed for me to massage them. That used to be a precursor for things to follow. Now I don't feel confident enough or close enough to her to take it to the next level, even though I want to in the worst way.

She confided in me two days ago about some things between her and my S10. She was upset about her behavior with him. If I posted here what happened between them - you all would tell me to get her to a psychiatrist. But the problem is that the incident occurred when I was not home. If I was there I would have grabbed her and taken her to the psychiatric hospital I spoke about earlier in the thread. But I wasn't there and when she confided in me she was very composed and said that what she did was for effect and realizes it was a big mistake. I think that was a step back towards trusting me enough to confide. Not that I did anything to betray her trust, it's quite the contrary, she really needs to earn my trust. But in my research on MLC, I found that trust of the spouse from the MLCr is a major hurdle to get over. Hopefully we are starting to bridge the gap. I really think this is a big weekend for us. I want to see how she handles things with us and the neighbors and ME. I can bet right now that she will want me to be with her and the neighbors every night to have drinks. Part of me wants to do it and really try to have fun and see how she responds. But i know in the back of my head that while I am doing that our kids are home next door with S14 having to babysit for the other two, while all the time they would really like to be doing something with us.

As you can see this is extremely complicated and I think it requires extreme patience and no hasty decisions.