REQ: Looking for a thread from a fellow DBer...

[Abbey]

involving yourself with the child should only come with a very strong, clear, commitment to a long-term monogamous R.

Right now you don't just have a WAS, you have a WAS+1, that simply is who he is.

I agree with you. Just to reiterate the b/g on this... H showed up at my door with OW being 8 weeks pregnant... and asked me to raise that baby with him. Up til the very recent month or so... he's STILL been in that frame of mind. And, and,... he wavers in and out of it still. One minute OW' is Madonna and should be crowned mother of the year, the next, she's a chain smoking, race car driving, melt-downer. All of which half the time he hates because they fight so much.

So, I'm not asking you to think in terms of what could be, rather just reframe your picture of what is.

But, but but,... I'm already there. Kind of hard to ignore the obvious, any more than than I could ignore the 9 months of sheer hell that accompanied the pregnancy. Trying to use the beginners mind... ESP when it was one of our bonds that we would be raising her together... is hard... and it's a juggling act. Emotionally, it one of the hardest parts of this. It's hard not to already allow myself to think of all 3 of us as a family. Esp when more than half the time H goes off on one of his tangents about getting exclusive custody... and cutting the OW right out of the picture. I don't see much choice but to try to keep a level head and detach appropriately enough to not let me feel like I'm not just losing a husband, but also what would be "us" as a family too. You see what I'm saying?

I actually expected I'd get more discourse with the idea of H and I essentially cutting her bio mother right out of the picture.

It's been our experience with the courts here, that they lean towards a strong stable family structure. OW is anything but.

Build your beginner's mind rather than focusing so much on writing the back-, present-, and future- stories for H and OW. I KNOW it is easy to do that. I KNOW much seems obvious and foretold to you. Just try to back off of that. Beginner's mind.

Yes and no. One technique that I found worked for me (and it's a personality quirk of mine, and a trained sales technique, I guess)... is that I will look at a sitch and say: Ok, what are the potential outcomes. A, B, C or D. From there, you assess what you will do if any of those scenarios present themselves.

It goes part and parcel with the question I asked MZ... about being able to predict what was probably going to happen next.

My T was quite interested in how closely I actually predicted the outcome once I did manage to detach far enough away to not have my heart shatter. My prediction on the outcome was uncanny. (My T's words.)

This time, I'm not happy about where I see this going for my H. Regardless of if we ever fix this... it scares me to think what she is capable of doing to him, in order to manipulate him. When this thing goes south,... (and considering what her past behavior has been.)

I can see in my H's future:
A/OW kidnapping DD and running when he files for custody.
B/OW accusing him of abusing her.
C/OW accusing him of abusing one of her other kids.
D/OW accusing him of sexually abusing his daughter.

I take NO pleasure in seeing that as a potential. Sadly, I'm not the only one who sees that as a possibility. Other members of his immediate inner circle see the same thing. Not good.