I am 40, she is almost there, but we have much years ahead and i want to enjoy something.
What do i do? Do i press again to 'improve myself' and spark a tidbit of interest in her again to hang on some more? I am tired but i'm afraid for the kids (now 12 and 14). I'm not sure what she wants. I don't care anymore. I get angry thinking about it. I don't deserve this. At what point do you throw in the towel?
All very good questions in the gauzy time between night and day, and none for which I, most of all I, have any good answers. But my job -- by which I mean my actual job -- is about questions. I have the same questions as you. Here are some I've asked myself, with tentative answers.
*What does it mean to "start again" at 45? Apparently not much. They seem to be, if not beating down the door, politely throwing pebbles at my window. I have confidence that there will be Someone Else for me.
*Do I want S.E.? I don't know the answer to this question, honestly. But it's oddly comforting to know that this is a question that can be answered.
*What do I do now? Sometimes I feel like a lab mouse, pressing the lever to get a yummy tasty pellet of affection from WAW. "Lookit, hun, lookit what I did!" *Bing!* Tasty pellet. And then darkness, as the experimenter turns out the lights in the lab. So do I wait some more, 'till the lights come back on? Again, I don't know the answer. So I've started asking myself this:
*What do I want to do now? Lately, since I experienced last week what I call on my sitch departing WAW's "Batsh*t-Crazy-a-Thon," what I want to do is be angry. Something I haven't really allowed myself to do, what with all my "hearing" and "validating" and "lovingly detaching." Right now I don't want to feel loving. So I'm not. And though I know it's not healthy in the long run, for right now it...Just. Feels. Right.
What I like about "What do I want to do now?" is that it shifts the power back to me. It gives me control over my own destiny. And it's dangerous. It compels me to think -- openly, honestly, without reservation, without rationalization, without hesitation -- about WAW, about our M, about our lives together. It makes me ask this question:
*Is this really a person I want "back"? Not the Idealized Herself. Not the Herself I married, lo these 18+ years ago. Not the Herself I remember. Not the Herself I want her to be. The Herself she is -- not who she is in this messed-up state we're all in in the midst of the maDness, but who she was a week before, a month before, the night before The Bomb. If I met her today, for the first time, if I'd been set up on a date with her by friends, what would I think to myself on the way home after saying, "Goodnight," at her door?
As the day of her departure approached, in the midst of a long telconvo during which she apologized for what turned out later to have been merely the Junior Varsity version of her Batsh*t-Crazy-a-Thon, WAW asked, "What can I do? Should I stay? Do you want me to stay?"
And I was tempted to issue forth with the Hurrahs and the Hallelujahs and the Hosannas and the Hip-Hip-Hoorays! But I caught myself, in the nick o' time, because I knew she wouldn't be staying for her or for They Who Must Be Nurtured or even for me, but for Guilt's Sake. And I asked myself:
*Is this what I really want, even in terms of my DB'ing? Just to hang on some more? Don't I want progress, some progress, any progress? And that was an easy one to answer -- hanging-on isn't enough for me. That much I do know. The Status-Quo is no longer tenable. I want more. More importantly, I deserve more. I'm not saying I "deserve" WAW -- don't have that much hubris. But I am saying that "hanging-on" is selling myself short. In a way it's selling her short. It's certainly not respectful of the Good that was in my marriage. Which led me, inevitably, to ask this:
At what point do you throw in the towel? I think on this fairly often. I don't have an answer, though I suspect I know what the answer is, and that I'm just avoiding it. I'm not sure you do throw in the towel. I'm not sure it's that abrupt. I suspect -- and those who have gone full-cycle on this will know far better than I -- that one day you just realize the towel isn't useful anymore. You don't throw it so much as turn away from it. And, hopefully, get a new towel. One of those really thick "bath sheet" kinds that you can just wrap yourself up in. And you dive back in the water, knowing that there's a comfy, cozy towel waiting to wrap you up when you come up for air.
--------- That's been (some of) my thought process, and maybe you'll gain some leverage on your own. There are, to be sure, some unique aspects to your sitch, not the least of which is your W's depression. One can sense that you feel it might be unfair to "judge" the situation while she's depressed -- she is, after all, not in her "right mind," so how fair is it to make decisions based upon that?
It's a good question, and one for which you might seek some professional counseling yourself. Is she willing to go to therapy? Drug treatment? Tried it before? Those are empirical questions that want answering. I'm one of those Silly People -- like all of us here -- who took "for better or for worse, in sickness and in health" rather seriously, despite my inherently Heathenic nature.
On the other hand, marriage isn't supposed to be a suicide mission, if you get my meaning. You're no good to her -- you're no good to the children, teens though they are -- if you pump all your Mojo into her, with no return (he said, knowing himself to be guilty of the same).
So perhaps you have two sets of questions to ask. One set about your evaluations of W's depression, how it affects you, how it affects the kids, how likely it is to be resolved, how willing she seems to do The Work necessary to resolve it.
And the second set is your evaluations about your M.
Between you and me and the firewall, I'm not sure which set is harder.
