Yes, I have to agree -- unless I truly feel the need to see my S's every morning they're with their mother, there's little cause for me to do so. My gut instincts tell me that it would be just returning tit-for-tat, fair or not. And you know what? I really do not feel so insecure that I feel the need to impose myself on them. It would be different if my S's were actually requesting my visit, but they're not -- and that actually gives me a level of comfort.
You see, the real problem with xW "dropping by" to visit our S's during my week has less to do with xW and her attempts to horn in on my parenting time, but what this might be doing to my S's. xW's core reason for doing this is her own deeply-ingrained insecurities. She has allowed her insecurities to lead her completely astray from the ideals she professes, so much so that the image she wants to portray as a goodly, upstanding person is a complete sham, a facade to hide the very insecurities and foibles that cause her to so stumble.
Furthermore, I am concerned with her efforts, conscious or not, to make our two S's just as insecure as she is. She may deny it publicly, but it is so painfully obvious that she wants both S9 and S5 to be so attached to her that the cannot function without her. She wants our S's to be so utterly needy of her that I will not be able to effectively parent them.
This in turn triggers my own degree of insecurity. I love both of my S's beyond measure. I want them to need their father as much as their mother. (Or that I do not want them to depend on their mother to the express exclusion of their father, I suppose.)
But I also love these children enough to recognize that undue dependence on either parent will ultimately harm them. As such I find myself genuinely disgusted with xW's fawning attempts to keep our S's tied to her apron strings. I do not want to make the same mistakes she is making.
And I can say that while I do truly miss my S's and would relish as much time with them as possible, I do not feel the need to impose myself on them. I have zero doubt that were I to also make a habit of dropping by xW's place each morning to see our S's, it would aggravate her to no end. But that alone is not a good enough reason for me to do so.
So I have decided that I will not force the matter -- if I see them in passing on my way to work, I will certainly stop and greet them with hugs and kisses, otherwise I will carry on during my week of "solitude" with stoic dignity.
I am counting on her eventually tiring of this game of hers, especially as I continue to make the effort to move us out the door each morning sooner than she can arrive.
I am certain this represents only but one means by which she "babies" our two boys, and much of this takes place under her own roof -- so there's nothing to be done about that. Thus I have to continue to work on them from "my end", shaping their characters -- at least to the degree that is in my power, of course -- so they will learn and grow up as wholly integrated young men free of the debilitating insecurities and character flaws that their mother seems to now laud and embrace.
(Unfortunately, even as a moderate counterbalance to her extreme co-dependent, insecure influence on them, I undoubtedly come off as more "cold" and lacking in "compassion", if only by degrees. It's a charge she has long sought to pin on me as would-be justification for ending our M. But I have at last learned to ignore her accusations, and to leave it in God's hands to shield my S's from her distortions of my motivations.)
Thanks for the words of advice, Gyps. I truly appreciate them. You may consider them imperfect, but given the greater imperfections in the World about us, they are very much more appropriate than one might at first think. Nothing in this world is perfect, after all.
