Dammit! Dam dam dam dam dam dam dam dam dam dam dam dam.
I'm feeling sorry for her. Splart! Gaack!
All that stuff @Greek writes about WAW. It's right!
Poor WAW. She came home from work last night and, though I thought I'd seen her discombobulated, she was stone-cold-discombobulated. With 48 hours or so left in this house, her house, "our" house, the kids' house -- she doesn't know which way is up.
And it's creating serious tension, just as @Coach predicted. I'd grilled some lamb chops for the kids 'n' me, and I'd told her on the phone that there was food left. So I grill up the chop, grill up some asparagus and mushrooms, bake her crescent roll (Pillsbury, dudes -- I'm not that good a guy, LOL), and serve it. And the look on her face is somewhere between Despair and Loathing, as if to say, "Who the hell do you think you are feeding me this tasty food, buster?"
And it just went downhill from there. She's tired of me being supportive. She's tired of me "wanting" her to say things -- she's got nothing to say! She's irritated by me being available! IT'S NOT SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS!
Yep. Gotta love that Divorce-Busting.
So I'm stepping back. She needs even more space, even more room. And, yes indeed @Greek, as hard as it is for LBS to acknowledge and accept, she needs time to grieve.
It's very weird, I'll admit. But I've come to the realization that we LBS tend to create caricatures of WAS -- just as they create caricatures of us -- in order to facilitate the process, whatever the Way of the WAS is. We know ourselves to be greater than the sum of our parts; we know that we're better than what our marital failings indicate; we know we're capable of better and more and deeper and richer -- hell, it's why we're working so hard at this thing. So why doesn't WAS see that, s/he says in anguish?
Because they can't see that, at least not while they're in the fog. Who're they going to believe, the Way of the WAS or their lying eyes?
Think about it objectively (and this is something we've discussed in earlier threads of mine) -- decades of research in social-psychology teaches us that, as humans, we hate disconfirming information. We take stuff that doesn't "seem right" and mush and mash and smush and smash it around until it does "seem right" -- where "right" is defined as "matching what we already believe." Each of us knows this just in terms of our politics -- "our" guy is always right, even if he's wrong, because his wrongness is "right."
It seems to me that the tipping point for the lucky few like @Coach/Greek is when WAS acknowledges that the eyes don't lie. When WAS stops fighting the disconfirming information and says to him/herself, "Maybe I was wrong."
But that's a tough row to hoe, sports fans. And WAS needs time and space to hoe that row.
I saw that last night, almost for the first time.
Because I'm Divorce-Busting or Way of Warring (cf, @Gypsy) or whatever-it-is-I'm-doing. And it's messing up the Way of the WAS. So now it's time to sit back. Keep up my GAL (I've sort of plateau'd, so need to re-energize there). I've got to Keep Rolling My Way.
