...so...where was I? Oh...yes...separated, living alone at home, missing my kids a lot when they're not with me, detached from my wife and aware that we can't be together if she's not willing to work on her, looking for work, planning for a trip to see family over the holidays, feeling the pangs of heartache every now and then...
I went out with a friend from college last night. He is separating from his wife - and the last time I talked with him it was a given that their marriage would end soon thereafter...last night, however, when we talked, I heard him use the word if a lot - which really surprised me. He was so very determined to leave their marriage just a month ago - yet last night he was saying "if" their marriage ends after their separation...so it is a trial separation to him as well...though he still feels like things can't necessarily be repaired.
Talking with him made me wonder a lot about "if's" and "certainty" and I found myself feeling more and more like certainty is mostly a shield from the challenge of living with ifs...which is to say that sometimes we make seemingly final decisions to keep us from having to tackle the questions behind the "ifs." For instance - when my wife moved out, she did so with a certainty that we had to be apart, that I was a bad husband to her, and that we were harmful to one another - her certainty kept her (and perhaps keeps her) from having to look at the "ifs" of her life and our life together - if she had been abused, how would that affect her now? If I am not the man she says I am, who am I? If her anger comes from her more than from me, why does she have so much anger?
Sometimes I hold out hope for my W (and us), just because there isn't an OM, she doesn't drink or do drugs, and she hasn't said anything about a divorce since she left. I know that the book she had been using as her bible - "Why Does He Do That" - says something about moving out as a test of the abusive husband - to see if he'll give the abused wife the space she needs - and to see if he can change - and if she still wants to be in the relationship - so what she's doing is still consistent with that book...
That said...I am growing apart from her through this separation - along with being detached - this space if giving me plenty of space and time to see not just what I did wrong in the relationship - but also how she affected me and my S11. She's not a bad person - in fact, she's a wonderful, talented, beautiful person - and she's very easy to fall in love with - what makes her hard to be with is her constant and unpredictable anger...it's weird...her family (i.e. her father and her sister) used to talk with me about my W's anger - this was years ago when we first started seeing one another - and they would ask me how I dealt with it. I more or less ignored the questions, thinking that her father was most likely the cause of the anger he blamed on his daughter (a patterns repeats) and that her sister just had the regular sibling issues with my W (then my GF).
But there has been anger there a lot over the years - I think it just got worse after our baby was born - and it happened to coincide with an attitude shift in me, in which I started to build up resentment toward her - and my resentment would eventually build up into my own anger.
Okay...I'm just clearing my head here...since in the back of my head is really the question of what do I want...and my answer is that I want to be with my Wife. Despite what we're going through, I love her very much. BUT I also know that I cannot be in a healthy relationship with her if she will not address her anger and her pain...and so, if we move on and divorce, I can accept that, since it would only mean that we could not find a way to be healthy together - and if we move on and reconcile, it would have to be with a serious understanding of the work we have to do, both as individuals and as a couple.
We're all going to my S2's Christmas pageant on Friday afternoon - not together - but we'll certainly see each other there. I'll have my S11 with me too. We haven't been in a social setting together in a long time - and when we are she always puts on the performance of everything being fine between us...so I am curious to see how she'll deal with this Friday...
