Yeah, I bagged the whole "about her" thing on New Year's Eve.
Like you, I'm not looking for "validation" from the STBX.
What the "It" that is not gotten (and that I find so frustrating/mystifying) is, is her continued, absolute lack of any emotional intelligence whatever -- she simply cannot seem to understand her impact on others, me or the kids. Or maybe it's more accurate to say that, from my point of view, she's not able to do that.
Proverbial bull in china shop.
You know how little kids don't really have a sense of spatial relations and either get too close or too far away and tend to knock things over ("it was an accident!")?
That's her in pyscho-emotional terms -- she doesn't understand (or perhaps more precisely, though I'm merely hypothesizing here, doesn't want to understand) that the things she says "stick" -- she seems to expect that I'll forget them as soon as they're said ("when are you going to stop throwing that back in my face?").
So on Monday she'll tell me she's afraid I'm going to murder our children just to get back at her ("like the Blue Hills guy") and on Wednesday offer to go out of her way to give me a ride from the car repair shop and apparently see no contradiction whatsoever in those two behaviors. And then she seems -- literally -- not to understand why I might decline the offer ("I'm sorry to hear that you won't accept my offer").
And when I -- as I now very infrequently do -- call her out on this kind of thing (I wrote her that I couldn't comprehend why she would be "sorry to hear that" when she'd just called me a child-murderer 48 hours before), she doesn't respond at all. It's like I'm talking into a vacuum (which is why I hardly bother).
One reason why I muse on it a lot is because throughout the marriage one of her refrains was that she was so attuned to others and I was so obtuse, but if the past 18 months is reasonable evidence she had that exactly backwards -- it's as if MLC and A and D opened up the Pandora's Box of her inner sociopath (metaphorically speaking).
Plus, and this is really the point (and is also, I think, a source of our recurring debate, yours and mine), I'm trying to learn as much as I can from this experience and take as much away from it in a positive sense so that my next R (assuming there is one) is informed on a deep level by the lessons and experiences and analysis I've tried to do here and tried to take from others here. That's just the way I'm programmed, I guess -- I have to understand, even if I (know I) ultimately can't.
Anyway, macht's nichts. The real thing is just to maintain an even strain until the next hearing, let The Mouthpiece do her job, and see what the upshot is.
I do have to start DB'ing again, though, with a beginner's mind, at least insofar as GAL goes. In the past 3 months all of my new, post-S running buddies have got new jobs elsewhere in the country, so once again I'm alone in the house, alone at the movies, alone at the coffee shop, and hitting tennis balls against a wall.
