We may have a chance after all

[optimist]

Hi everybody. This is going to be a long post, so bear with me. Lots of things happened last night.

I backslid big time again but it did not seem to mess things up too much. I get predictably antsy in the weekends despite my H trying hard to be home as much as possible and call me a lot. He even brought me some Aciphex yesterday for my upset stomach

Anyway, I had snooped (I know,I know... -is there an icon for shaking your head dejectedly?) and found the car's passenger seat again pushed back and the whole car smelled like a whorehouse to what I think is OW's perfume. To be fair to my H: this weekend I was smelling faint traces of that perfume everywhere (on him 3h AFTER a shower, when he had been with me all the time, even on my D's hair!). Anyway, it did nothing for my PMA. But I did not comment.

A couple of hours later, we were watching a movie and I asked him if he could do me a favor. He put his best face of 'oh, no, not again, there we go' but said 'OK what do you want?'. I asked him to come to the bank today and take this woman out of all the accounts and put me instead. He was a bit pissed and said that he had to talk to the CPA and that we could do it this week, but not today. I said 'fine, this week then'. But my body language may have said otherwise (I felt very sad ).

He was quite exasperated and said 'we cannot go on like this'. He got up and into the closet, to get dressed (and, I assumed, to go away). I told him 'do not run away, let's talk' so we at down, in the closet, and talked a lot

He tells me he is scared of the weekend because I get so anxious and he does not know when I am going to blow up. He is very fixed in my body language and interprets nearly every gesture as stress or upset (he is right often but not all the times).

I explained to him that he was right, that I was stressed and upset and why (OW still in the picture made me feel rejected and suspicious). He explained to me why he had her there (same explanation) so I said 'we have a communication problem: you are trying to explain something to me and I do not understand what is your meaning. To me it means you do not care enough about me to get her out of the door.' He tried to define it as MY problem as opposed to HIS problem, but I refused to asign blame. Anyway, we had a very long talk and got some things out of it.

1. I still do not understand why he keeps that W there. He even darkly hinted that I was pushing him to spend more time away from home (probably true ). He said that he is doing this for himself, and hinted that the C (which he quit going to in 7/03) had told him to do it. Unfortunately for him that excuse is way too similar to the excuse he had given me for spending an occasional weekend away from home (he was supposed to be at a stress management retreat that he had taken up when I asked him to get help with depression. Something I do not remember doing BTW). I later learned he was going to OK with OW those weekends.

2. He knows a lot of what is going on with me: my problems trying to get my family to the same page I am in, and even the BB (though he thought it was a chat room). He has a lot of issues with my family, and is mad I told them about his A. He is even mad I pulled his family into it, but what on earth did he expect when he had taken OW to his mother house when she was dying and even to the funeral? My H had told his family we were getting a D (nice, if he had told ME about it and that he had an A and was denying it to me!). He even told me not to go to his mother's funeral because he did not trust anyone else to take care of our daughter and he'd feel less worried! Anyway, when I learned the truth about his A I made him call his sister and explained everything to her on the speaker phone (so that he could hear everything). So he makes me a laughingstock in front of his family and I am the one who involved them in the mess!

3. As to the BB, he does not seem to understand why would I want to post here and said he would not do something like that. He says he does not mind if I do, but I am not sure of how sincere he is about that. In any case it is a ggod opportunity to introduce the topic and talk to him about you all. I think he was mostly mad at my not having told him about it. I explained to him that I felt it helped me defuse the tensions and not pour them on him . Will see.

4. We talked about my insecurities and I stressed I appreciated all his help and I saw the positives. I do not know if that helped or not. A couple of times he hesitated to tell me stuff and I encouraged him to with a (nice) 'I'd rather hear it now than have it come up in a couple of years' I expressed my fear of repeating the old patterns of communication: I innocently do something he dislikes, he does not tell me and goes along but resents it in silence, than it explodes 5 years later for some unrelated reason.

Somehow the conversation died away and we went back to watch TV in our bedroom. I was in bed reading one of Calysta's threads and he came up to the bed and snuggled in with me. Sweet because he sits in an armchair most of the time to watch TV.

He later went out (9 p.m.) to get air in his car's tires (apparently one was low and he feared it would be flat in the morning) and came back quite quickly. We went back to watch TV and I asked him if he would like to have our wedding bands repaired (his is too large for him and he has not worn it in years. Mine lost the stone a good 7 years ago and we did not have the money to fix it, so I stopped wearing it too. He gave me a new one for my birthday this year but it also was too large and I was in no mood to fix it -we had separated just 5 days before).

In all, I think it was a productive conversation. I'd much rather have things out in the open. Now I have to center in taking care of my mental mess and see what happens