@antlers -- "protective rationalization" quote is from Catch-22
@hoping -- hey, if you can't laugh at yourself, you can you laugh at? Well. I suppose, now that you mention it, nearly anyone! I had that experience at my 20-year reunion, too -- I didn't realize I'd gone to high school with so many old folks.
@Coach -- I intend at some point to bring it up, but I feel there's too much going on right now. Once she surrenders to the powerful logic of The Mouthpiece's arguments and signs off on the settlement proposal (heads we win, tails you lose), then I'll start in on the honest dialog. Right now I'm in the if-you-can't-say-anything-nice-don't-say-anything mode -- living the @Gypsy Doctrine, if you will.
@hooisermama -- that's it in a nutshell: you see the other parent parent "their way," and you just want to scream. But, as @aliveandkicking points out, you have to do it.
@DanceQueen -- no, that's absolutely right, this is who she is. She's never made any bones about the fact that (her words, her POV) I'm the better parent. As I've said though, the substantive implications of that are (or seem to me to be, at any rate) different when one is en suite as opposed to solo. As my therapist and the kids' occasional counselor have said, it's not (in their POV) that "she doesn't care for them, it's that she doesn't care for caring for them." Which, as several of you have noted, is intensely frustrating.
Fortunately they're offering a tango class down at the community center next month....
@aliveandkicking: Ah, friend, you speak wisdom. You're absolutely right about the compensating thing, and I catch myself doing it. I know I was doing it over the holiday break, but I felt so much that I just wanted to "make Christmas" for them, if you know what I mean.
But you do indeed have to let the Other Parent (OP?) parent, and you have to believe in your children enough to let them hurt and let them reach their own conclusions. The compensating, which is -- let's face it -- just another form of codependence, could be as much a favor to OP as to the kids -- almost like you're saying, don't worry about sucking at this, I'll be so great that it'll offset your parental suckitude, and the kids will still have a childhood.
The other point you raise, though, is another piece that worries me, and that's this idea of "patterning." What do Themselves learn about what parents do as they grow up in this situation? The soon-to-be-ex-Mrs.-SP [and N.B. @DanceQueen, she is no longer "WAW" in the Saga because I no longer consider her to have "wife" status] is no worse a mother -- and in many respects is a better mother -- than her own was. And as to the maternal grandmother, well she more-or-less gave her baby daughter to her Maiden Sister and bolted for the Coast to get a job and be an exciting working woman with "freedom" -- and this in the 1940s! Her sister is childless (and gleefully so -- which STBXMRSSP is intensely jealous of). So there's no real maternal role-model for the STBXMRSSP other than me.
But my concern is that there won't be a maternal role-model for Girl-Child Herself, either, other than me. My mother lives in Midwestern Town and isn't much of a role-model either, at least in the hands-on "Mom Work" sort of way (both kids asked me last night, "Daddy, how come you can cook so good when Grannie can't?" LOL -- in Grannie's cuisine, well-done is "too red").
I give STBXMRSSP major props for expressions of love, however, which she also never had as a child. They "know" (or hear, at any rate) that she loves them -- I'm just not sure they see it.
But of course all this could change on a dime when puberty hits, right? She could prove to be the greatest parent in the world for teenagers -- she's into all that stuff -- and I could be the old fuddy-duddy who can't let go.
But that's the future, and as Albert Einstein said, I try not to think about the future because it will get here soon enough.
