Hey lodo, I'm 10 miles East of Boulder. That book title sounds like it hit the nail on the head. I can accept and forgive a lot. What I can't do is ever change enough to change the past and as long as she is stuck there this R can't move forward. Don't misunderstand, I still have work to do on me. However, when in my estimation, our R is no different today than it was a year ago and I've changed so much that in some ways I'm unrecognizable, I'm forced into a conclusion that at this point, the bottle neck to progress is not me. I'm not going to stop DB and I'm not going to try and rush things toward D. One area of concern for W is my relationship with and to the kids with her feeling that I'm very self focused and not much interested in them. That is an area that still needs work. So, perhaps some similarly large changes in that dynamic will shake things loose for her and if it doesn't, it still is something that I need to do.
As far as the living arrangements for sharing custody. We are both agreed that we want to try and minimize the disruption to the kids. Then, as far as the parent's social life, right now she has a place of her own and I'm primary with the kids. If she wants to, she can have the social life of a single person subject to the availability of funds to support it. I've been out 5 times in the last 3 months and paying for someone to watch the kids was easily double what I spent going out. What I'm saying is that my social life would improve by several orders of magnitude if I didn't have the kids every other week.
Damn, thinking about this, I find myself swinging from one extreme to the other. When I saw W this morning, I just wanted to pull her in tight and kiss her and work extra hard on this R. Then, as I was driving to work and thinking over all the other crap, I want to move on and not spend any more energy on this M. We've got our MC in 2 weeks. I'm going to take that time and revel in the chaos in my mind and try and experience every emotion and every thought fully and try to synthesize some overarching thoughts about who we are where we are at and what things seem plastic enough to change and which things seem unlikely to change and then have a discussion with W and C as to the best path forward.
