Last night she went out with a friend and said she would be back several hours later. I was extremely suspicious and called her about 2 hours later and got her in her car so she had to admit to coming home rather than going with the OM as she apparently planned. About an hour after coming home she got a cell phone call in my presence and promptly deleted it fromt the call list. But I already know what is going on so no big mystery. I decided not to confront at that point.
I had prepared a really good meal for the family and was reading a book at the table when she came in and she ate her dinner sitting at the table with me (rather than standing at the counter or over the sink) and we talked about parenting issues and some of the conflicts with our children and I was reading to her some of the passages about parenting styles and discussing them.
She then began to seriously cry and wail and hyperventilate about how bad a parent she was and how her life was crap and how she wanted to be perfect. I rubbed her back, told her that no one is perfect and parenting is a difficult thing when there is conflict in the house and where there were no good role models for us when we were children (which there weren't). She did not turn to hug me, but I could tell there was a tremendous amount of guilt in each one of her sobs not related to the children.
I guess that I was to some degree pleased that she was having an emotional breakdown for everything she has been putting the family through, but I can also empathise with the pit-in-the-stomach feeling that the conflict also brings.
I was not angry at all, but at this point I felt an emotional detachment that means that if things end in D, I'll go on. In fact, in our last MC session, one of the questions I was asked by the MC was what I would do if it ended. I replied that I'd go on and that I was young enough to find someone else. I knew she was paying attention to that because the next day while swimming with the children and her, she commented about my statement about finding someone better(!) than her. Of course I did not say "better" in the MC session, but clearly that is what she heard. I corrected her and said that there was no one "better" than her and that it was just a hypothetical question anyway.
