Yesterday was a full day. Had counciling - funny, W insists on calling it "couple's councling", not marriage counciling. Also had a long meeting with the mediator.
The message from both of them were essentially the same: "You two don't know what you want." The mediator (I think this woman is a lawyer in addition to being LMFT) basically said, it's OK to not know, you'll know when you know... give it time.
Counclier reiterated establishing the boundaries, coming up with the support and custody agreements. Essentially she's giving the same advice as DBing, I guess - space, boundaries, live seperate lives until the dust settles.
From the mediator, I think it's pretty clear that we're going to have to put up the house for sale, neither one of us would be able to keep it. She actually seemed to get a little thrill when she detected some possibility of reconsiliation, and that she might help with that. When we talked about some of the stuff we had done together recently she said, "You're dating..." (meaning each other). We worked through some of the contentious financial data, basically said W needs to make the business tax returns available to establish her real income. Having a productive conversation about this maybe helped take a step back to trust. Actually, she said that it seemed that we really had no problem with trust in general from our behavior.
We didn't come out of mediation with anything more than a conversation, and a bunch of data - she ran the numbers for different scenarios of support.
In therapy, we talked about the moments of connection that we've had, and all the confusion we've both experiencing. The C's paraphrasing of W was something along the lines of "I feel bonded and connected to you, but am unsure if I can live with you..." All stuff I knew. Same old thing.
In the car, W expressed her confusion - what she thinks she wants, but can't seem to go more than a couple of days without seeing me. I don't know, it seems like reconciliation is becoming part of her vocabulary, a potential option. She seems to agree that she doesn't know what she wants. I don't want to get hung up on hope here, but...
So, the real takeaway is to continue the limbo. Don't finalize the divorce. Live seperated. Implement support and custody, even if it's not a legal agreement. Limit time together (funny, we got different advice about that, everyone's got a different opinion - add in the children's therapist, and that's another vector).
Well, essentially what everyone on this board has advised. I'm probably a source of some eye-rolling here. But I guess it's coming together now. Stop the cake-eating, focus on my life and the boys, go somewhat dark. Funny, we're doing this by agreement.
