Walk Away German Wife (WAGW)

[PortlandDad]

I'm having a real hard time processing right now. My W continues to build her new life step-by-step, and the feeling of powerlessness as I hear about what she is doing is overwhelming. I know that I need to push back on all that and just focus on me and my kids, but I'm finding it so hard to do.

I just found out that my W bought a car and had a phone installed in her apartment (she had been using a cell phone until now), and today the cable TV guy is coming to install her cable. These are all pretty simple things by themselves, but I look at them as steps away from us and the family. When she first went to Germany and was living with her folks, it looked like she could come home any day because she had no attachments. Each thing she does (the apartment, the car, the job, her school enrollment) becomes one more tie that binds her there.

I know that this is going to take time. We've been separated for 3 months now and except for some minor normalizing of her behavior toward her parents, she hasn't shown anything that I would call progress. She still denies that she ever had an EA and that the OM is no longer in her life. I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it: while she has been a pod person, I've only received a litany of lies from her.

The other problem is money. When we separated, I agreed to give her sizable sum of money as a down-payment against a future divorce. I told her that she shouldn't spend it unless she was sure that a divorce is what she wanted because we had to take out a home-equity loan for the money. I suspect that she is probably mostly through that amount now considering all the stuff that she is doing and the fact that she still has a credit card statement that comes to me, and that is a couple thousand a month.

Not my problem, I know, but when she runs out of money she is liable to do something desperate to keep funding the fantasy. Do I help her with that? I'm already strapped with a big house payment for the house she had to have, and raising 3 kids by myself. In the last year of our marriage together she was spending money like it was going out of style. She wiped out our savings and maxed two of our credit cards with frivolous spending. It makes me sad to see that she hasn't learned anything about fiscal responsibility yet.