Informally separated from WAW, but DBing my best

[AlwaysTrying]

Thanks, MrBond. I had intended to fill in the story Sunday a few minutes after my first post, but since I'm new here, I wasn't able to add to the thread until a moderator approved it.

Timeline
1998 - W and I met. I was married and had a 2-year-old daughter. I moved out of XW's house about two weeks later. My oldest daughter has never forgiven me for leaving that marriage. I would do things differently if I had them to do over. My future wife was dating my best friend for about 6 months. Shortly after that, W and I were dating for a solid 6 years.
2004 - W and I got married. So in love.
2005 - Our son was born. He didn't sleep for 18 months. It broke me.
2006 - I was unable to work for quite a while. I let a client steal $7,500 from me because I was too depressed to stand up for myself. I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Sleep deprivation is a trigger for me. Wife declared bankruptcy to cover the bills.
The depression, the baby stress, and the money stress took a huge toll on the marriage. W had to threaten divorce before I was willing to seek counseling.
2007 - My bipolar symptoms had been stable and well-managed for some time. With the blessing of my psychiatrist, W and I decided to buy a house and have another baby. When one of my contracts ended (I'm often a freelance computer programmer/consultant), I took a full-time job for stability.
2008 - My second daughter was born. Also didn't sleep. At least she ate. But she was allergic to everything and had awful acid reflux. I spent late hours every night shambling my baby girl in laps around my living room or down the street because it was the only thing that calmed her down.
2009 - More sleep deprivation, more depression, more problems at work. I lost the job. Again, it was a big stress on the marriage. I spent two months of the summer of 2009 on unemployment with my kids. It was great. My wife resented me for it. After that, I got a series of lucrative contracts and things felt pretty good.

There are a number of points in here where I can point out what I did to harm my marriage. I've had months to dwell on it. The biggest mistake I was making was keeping my wife out of my affairs because it stressed me out when she got stressed out. She can be an anxious person, and that's putting it lightly. I thought that by not telling her what was going on in my life with my depression or with my money, I could keep everything smooth and enjoy life better.

I can talk about the specific things that I've done wrong and how I have changed my mindset and started acting differently. When I have asked for help in other places, I've beaten myself with my mistakes. I feel now that once my wife got to a certain point, *everything* I ever did was wrong, and I was desperate to find things that I could fix so that she could come back to me.

Now, I'm not sure that is productive. One of the things I found wrong with me is that I suffer from "nice guy" syndrome and needed to grow a backbone, stop being passive-agressive, and stand up for myself.

My wife did tell me that she feels like my soul is shattered into tiny little pieces, and that since I don't have access to my own soul, I had to hold on to hers so tightly I was crushing it. So... that's something I've been working on, as well.

April 2011 - I think my wife was getting the sense that there was something wrong with me, and she was nervous not knowing what was going on with my finances. I got an insufficient funds notice in the mail one day and it really upset her. I told her it was OK, because I had a $10,000 check. That upset her, too, knowing that I'd waited so long to bill that client, when that is what bankrupted us before.

I knew there was something wrong with me. The medications for treating bipolar disorder are all mood dampeners. They take the color out of the world. They make you dumb and forgetful, uninteresting. It's a great deal of fun to be on the edge of mania if you can be lucky enough not to go full maniac and hurt yourself or anyone else. Convincing people who have enjoyed the highs of bipolar disorder to give it up and accept their lives will be better if they take these drugs is not easily done.

I had what I would characterize as a minor case of bipolar disorder. I never did anything terribly dangerous, was never anywhere near psychotic, and I actually benefitted from the occasional 36-hour mania-fueled work day. But I did suffer from occasional depression that made it hard to work.

Anyway, I figured that I could manage my symptoms through a strict sleep schedule and by keeping manic behaviors in check so I didn't risk swinging into depression, and that as I got better at this, I could wean myself off the meds. I knew my wife wouldn't understand and wouldn't support this, so I didn't tell her anything about it. I figured if I could be stable for a few months off the meds, I'd tell her what was going on and.... she couldn't complain because I'd be "OK".

I did this under the care and support of my psychiatrist, though not with her enthusiastic blessing. I never went off my meds or made changes without talking to my doc. For two years I had been trying to will myself even and steady so I could wean off the drugs, but it was never quite good enough and I'd go through periods where I really struggled to stay motivated.

Here in April of 2011, I realized that I had lost and that I needed more drugs not less. I was having a terribly difficult time remaining motivated and productive, and having difficulty concentrating. I told my doc things weren't right, she agreed, and put me on Ritilin. Ritilin worked for a few weeks, then it didn't. It kinda worked for another few weeks on a higher dose, but it eventually made things worse and threw me into a depression. By July, my doc put me on something else (Fanapt) and everything got better. The time in between was lousy, but my communication with my wife was even lousier.

She assumed I was playing with my meds or something, and when she found out that I had been endeavoring to get off the drugs, she was upset. Meanwhile, I wasn't able to work full weeks during this period (I could only concentrate for about 20 hours a week. Computer programming requires concentration.), so I was depleting my bank account and not talking to my wife about that either.

We started seeing a marriage counselor during this period because she was really unhappy. We saw the pain others around us were in because of divorce and we would look into each other's eyes when we laid down at night and say to each other, sincerely, "Let's never get divorced." My wife would tell me how she was so frustrated by what I was doing, but that it was futile because I was never going to change and she wasn't going to divorce me over it.

It shouldn't have been so hard for me to see it coming. We were in marriage counseling and I was not giving my wife what she needed (to know what was going on with my treatment and finances) week after week. I feel dumb writing about it now.


I'm exhausted right now. I want to go to sleep, so I'll rush through the rest.
In early July, in the course of a week, W goes from being all warmth and love to cold and unable to come to bed at night. She's thinking about leaving me but doesn't want to tell me about it. I'm pretty sure she wanted to make her mind up for herself first, then inform me of the decision. I wanted to be part of the decision making process.

She had been texting a male highschool friend of hers like crazy - 3500 texts a month, compared to the 500 or so that passed between W and me. He came to town to visit for a weekend, used the magic words "barely functional" to my wife, and that's when she started talking about leaving me.

I called EA on them. She denies it, but she hesitated enough that I think she knows it is true. She doesn't want to think of herself as cheating, but she let someone else come between us. There was more to that, but I don't get the sense that worrying about her EA with this guy has ever helped our efforts at reconciling.

Around July 7th, she wouldn't come to bed. At three in the morning, I came back to the living room (she had been on her internet message board for hours, just like every night) and said there was something wrong and that I knew it. She had been increasingly secretive and cold and distant. I asked her if she was thinking about leaving me. She said it was something she was thinking about but that she wasn't ready to talk about it yet and I was getting worried prematurely.

But since I asked, yes, she was thinking it would be a good idea if we separated for 6 to 12 months.

I begged, pleaded, cried, etc, etc, etc. For days. Weeks. She hadn't made her mind up and was listening to my plea that we should find a way to work this out before we move to separation. I couldn't believe she would even consider doing that to the kids or to me.

I spied on her. She found out. She demanded that I leave the house and "give her space". I cried the first day that passed that I didn't talk to her. In 13 years, I had talked to her nearly every day. For 13 years, one of us waited up for the other one to come to bed. I didn't know how to sleep alone for a long time. I couldn't eat much. I lost 25 pounds. I could only manage to stay sane enough to work for a few hours out of the day.

I couch surfed at friends houses because I couldn't understand spending the money on an apartment when we ought to be working together to sort our stuff out.

In late August, a few days before our 7th anniversary, I had been out of the house for 4 weeks. W was thinking about our vows and starting to miss me and told her therapist that she was thinking about re-committing to me.

I was going crazy with no place of my own to be. Not knowing my wife's state of mind, I told her I was coming home, no matter what the consequences.

It's so easy to see what I did wrong. I wish I had been on this board back then and had gotten some better advice.

A week later, she filed D.

Given that, there was NO WAY I was moving back out of the house. I thought that if I dragged my feet on the divorce long enough, she'd appreciate the changes that I'd been making and that we'd work things out instead.

She made it clear a couple of times that there might be an alternative to divorce, but that alternative was a legal separation that was functionally the same as divorce, except that I get to keep my health coverage. I wasn't going for it.

I could see that what I was doing wasn't working and that we were coming very close to a point where we were going to be in a bitter custody battle, so I told her that I'd move out if she put the divorce on hold.

That was a little over a month ago. She didn't agree. I moved out anyway, in a bid to earn some good will. She then agreed to put the divorce on hold for 3 (or more) months as long as I'd stay out of the house.

I should qualify. My stuff is still at the house, I just don't go there most days. Tuesdays and Fridays are my nights with the kids - I pick them up from school and take them to the house and put them to bed in the one and only bedroom they've ever had and hopefully ever have to have. Friday nights I stay at the house and wake up with the kids Saturday. I spend the day with them, put them to bed, then leave again.

I'm renting a room now for my sanity, but it's just a place to sleep.

Anyway, it's been over a month that I've been out. It was a month that I was away the first time before she started telling her therapist that she wanted to fix things. Somehow, when I came home uninvited in August, something snapped in her, and I don't know how to fix it.

She has such thick walls now that it is very hard to tell what she is thinking or feeling. When she lets her guard down for a while, it feels really nice, but she gets really nasty shortly afterward. I understand that's part of the cycle.

I don't want to spend 18 months doing this. I want to know how to get back into her heart now! but I'll wait.