What's it really all about?

[AlexEN]

What I’ve come to realize is that for me The Fear is what we are about to tell the children (that we will be getting a D) and my belief that it will forever change their lives…

@Smiley, as he so often does, captured the weight of that Fear when he wrote about it a couple of weeks ago:

It's incomprehensible to me. Knowing what's coming - wondering what the looks on their faces will be, what the ache in their little hearts and tummies will be, how confused and frightened and abandoned and betrayed they're going to feel – makes my head spin…

And while I think SP, nobly perhaps, took more of the blame than I am willing to in my sitch, something else he wrote then resonates loudly after having read the cards my children made for me this Father’s Day weekend:

I feel so inhumane, so profoundly guilty that our failure to meet each others’ adult needs also has to be so terribly, terribly destructive of their child-needs.

I finally realized that it is that fear and the guilt that it engenders with which I am consumed.

But, I know, too, that it just doesn’t matter how sure I am that I am right ... It just doesn’t matter.

Just as sure as I am of this (that there is another path we could take), so, too is W sure she has to leave our marriage.

And, she’s right... THAT marriage had to die and SHE has to leave; and I accept that she no longer wants ANY M with me or to take a chance on US again.

Yet, if I’m being honest with ME, I don’t love the person in HER body anymore (the lust hasn’t gone away, but that’s not love, but I digress…). She is NOT the girl I fell in love with 25 years ago. I do NOT love the person she believes she has become. She does NOT love the person I have become. She chooses NOT to love the person I have become.

So, similar to thoughts that @SP, @Thinker, @A&K and others have expressed recently, I’ve also come to realize that what I’ve been “fighting” for, at least in the most recent past, has been for our family, not for WAS nor for me.

Do I believe we could have a fantastic R? Yes. Do I think it would be easy? No. Do I think she will ever question herself or her decisions? Don’t know, but I do know it won’t be soon. Do I have any control over her? Zippo. Can I DB any longer? Yes, but for ME, not to win her back.

So, am I becoming, in a sense, a WAS myself as I realize I need to move on despite the heartache I never wanted my children to feel. W will be fine and I will be fine, but, the “greater good” will not have been served. Do they deserve to suffer the consequences of our failings? No, but I guess they have no choice... and that, my friends, $ucks.

@A&K’s recent posts about narcissism raise the interesting question about how much of one’s “selfishness” (in the non-Smiley sense) is intrinsic versus extrinsic, but I digress... again... although it is a topic I want to remember to revisit.

I have plenty of faults; I’m working on me, for me; but can’t quite come to Smiley’s Place and say it is All About Me, although I fully grasp the nuance of his assertion. It’s within the realm of “Easier said than done” that I find myself getting tripped up. And that gets back to some of the $hit in my R with W. We used to joke that “she was right about everything and I was never right about anything”, but that spoke to an attitude not the reality.

Her confidence that she is never wrong (or personality trait that does not allow her to ever be wrong, as our MC, now my IC, suggested is the case) allows her to come across as very convincing even when her assertions, upon further review, might have everyone around her scratching their heads; on the flipside, I could be certain of something, yet still willing to hear the counterpoint. Not a good combo.

And, yeah, @Coach and @Gucci, I know that it wasn’t particularly attractive either. [Aside to @Puppy: I think it’s the “Good Guy” co-dependency/enmeshment ‘thang.]

That’s the me $hit I’ve been working on; but, and in doing that Work, it’s lead me to a place where I realize, while I love W, I am not in love with her anymore (sound familiar?); I AM in love with the “idea” of our family and am saddened by the traditions that will be lost, but without W being a willing participant in OUR intact family, it is not a family (my purpose now is not to debate broken vs. dented families) as I desire it to be…


To be continued...