When we are separate it will be much easier to set and keep boundaries once I figure out what I want to do. I don't think I want to be friends with her, certainly not for me, but I am worried about her.
There's no time like the present to set a boundary.
Stop worrying about her. Did she ever stop to think that her action my of conseqences?
I am friendly(Civil) but other than stuff about the kids, I couldn't care less what she does. She's a big girl and makes her own decisions.
Worrying about her is def one of my issues. I'm trying to deal with that. Sure she has thought about the consequences of her actions, but I refer back to the comparison to the drowning victim. She is just trying to save herself.
She lost her mother to ALS when she was about 14. That was preceded by a few years of her mother being there but being inaccessible. (It is not lost on me that do to certain tensions in our life, I may have been "there but inaccessible" as far as she was concerned.) It also made it impossible for her to learn to ask for anything because she could not ask her mother for anything. There are all kinds of attachment/guilt/modeling issues that resulted that I did not fully appreciate and ours is not the only relationship she is "walking away" from. It is also no coincidence that my daughter recently turned 14, as several professionals have told me. We also had a healthy does of the fear/shame dynamic going on. Throw in a bunch of other factors and we arrived at a perfect storm that shook apart what appeared to everyone to be a perfect marriage and life. Not really her fault. We were both victims of our own issues and she is not strong.
So, I worry about her and I believe that she would not be hurting us like this if she was not hurting more than any of us. Thus, my dilemma.
