Thanks Mila, SA, Irish, punkin, CW, and MHL for stopping by! I had lunch with X-SIL yesterday and wanted to post a brief update.....
.......but first I wanted to respond to a question punkin asked previously
Originally Posted By: punkin
Were you and XH always so athletic together?
One of the core values that H/XH and I shared was a belief in the value of a healthy lifestyle: healthy diet and regular exercise. I've been a cyclist for 25 years and began weight-training ~10 years ago. XH is an A level racquetball player and has played with the same group of friends for 30 years. He also weight trains. Unfortunately, even though we shared the same love of physical exercise, I can't play racquetball at all and XH didn't like biking much. When his knees got bad, he wouldn't even go walking with me. We tried at times to weight train together, but XH wouldn't go to the health club with me in the evening when it was convenient for me....he would only go right after work. The health club was only 10 minutes from his work, but ~40 minutes from MY work, so by the time I got there he was ready to go home. He was rigid about this timing thing (he shows tendencies toward OCD [e.g. he sometimes feels compelled to pick up TT balls on the floor because it bothers him to see them there]) .....so the TT is actually a giant leap forward in that department for both of us. XH is playing TT with me for 1 1/2 hours beginning at 6 or 6:30pm, the time I used to arrive at the health club but he would already be heading home.
Journaling........ I had lunch with X-SIL yesterday. We talked about the kinds of things that girlfriends would talk about. I DO value her friendship and don't want to put her in the middle. We talked about some medical concerns she has and career struggles. She is currently working 3-4 PT jobs and her H doesn't realize that this extends to the equivalent of more than 1 FT job. I told her I could understand because when I was at the university I had to juggle the politics and implementation of multiple projects simultaneously. It told her how happy I am now that I am not managing people (less stress!) and can leave my work at the office.
.......at one point I told X-SIL about a patient that I evaluated last week. This woman (early 40s) looked ~20 years older than her age. She was unkempt and had deep lines in her face, no attempt at make-up. This woman has 4 sons: 8 year old triplets and a 10 year old. As I interviewed her to assess her stress level she told me that she is thinking about D'ing her H. I said that if she felt that she was stressed in her current situation because H doesn't help as much as she would like, she would most likely not have less stress after a D and I asked her if she had told her H how she was feeling. (I have to be careful not to overstep my bounds in a clinical setting but think that sometimes if a professional, objective party questions their thought processes, they might think again).........Anyway, I conveyed this story to X-SIL (she is on her 4th M) and she said without missing a beat "Believe me, I know that is true".
After lunch I drove X-SIL to their mother's house where XH and a repair guy were working to prepare it to be rented. I got a tour of the house..........They've done a very nice job and I told them so. XH's mother was a compulsive hoarder, so I'd never seen most of the house before. I finally saw the room that XH moved into for 8 months after he dropped the bomb. It must have been VERY dark and depressing for him there. It was a basement bedroom with dropped ceiling and fluorescent lights above clear plastic tiles in the ceiling. H/XH used to tell me that mice would crawl around on the dropped ceiling while he was trying to sleep at night (there was so much clutter in the house that there was a REAL mouse infestation). Ughhhhh!!!!!!!! Jody always said that one of the reasons XH pushed to D me was because of the conditions in which he was living, so it was good for me to see first hand.
GF#2 wasn't at the house helping, so it would seem that she's not a big part of his life........I also noted that XH has not been good about asking his sister for help with finishing the house for rental or taking their mother to her doctor's appointment, but XH makes sideways comments showing his unhappiness that his sister isn't helping more........so this is something XH needs to address. don't know if he'll figure it out.
