Wife of 6-Years is Divorcing Me pt.V

[workinghardguy]

I wouldn't beat yourself up over a game or Risk. Even if you had made it through that game of Risk there would've very likely been some other event soon down the road that would've been the trigger. You hadn't internalized the need for change yet. It hadn't struck home truly and squarely. Sure, had you handled the game differently it might have let things continue for a while longer, but eventually you would've ended up here anyway.

This may seem trivial, but I knew I was ready to internalize change the night after the bomb. For my entire life I've chewed my fingernails. And not in a "here and there" manner either... It has bothered my wife for years, and doubly so when our young son started doing it.

I've quit biting my nails probably a dozen times in the past seven years. She stops smoking and I stop biting my nails. I usually fail within 3-4 days and maybe the longest I've gone is a week.

So the night after the bomb was our anniversary and we went out. I asked her how the no smoking this was going (one week at that point) and pointed out that I hadn't bit my nails in four days (this was before I'd read DR or had a clue, so please, no 2x4s!). Her reply was essentially "I don't really care. You've quit so many times and never stuck with it. I'm not going to believe it until I see you not doing that for a very long time."

So I wanted to say, oh really? Ms. Quit Smoking more times that I can count! But I kept my cool and internalized what she said. I realized she was right. And little did I know it would be a foreshadowing of the things to come.

I've never been ready to internalize something that really bothered her about me. At least not enough to put it first. Unfortunately it has taken a crisis to make that happen. But I'm not going to beat myself up, because that's how humans tend to operate - crisis drives change.

And for the record, I haven't chewed my fingernails for a month now straight. I actually had to look up nail care and stuff like that today because they were getting ridiculously long and I didn't know what the heck to do with them! And if I can do it in the middle of this crapstorm then I figure I should be good

Now if only nail biting was the width and breadth of our issues!