the path is the goal...

[zig]

thanks cat04
yes it bothers me a lot - terribly. i've seen it as s mimicking h's behavior. right after he moved out h started saying my name in this really odd way - as if he was forcing himself to say it. also overnight , after referring to me as "mama" when he talked to s, he started referring to me by my name but saying it very strangely

s started to do the same - especially now when he uses my name because he is disapproving of what i'm saying - it has the same intonation as h. it's sort of chastising and rebuking at the same time.

i like what you suggested about making a boundary with s and enforcing it by not responding - i never thought of it in terms of that. i will try that out very gently. i understand that s is a child, and he is doing it because he is so confused and affected by this sitch.

Often when we try to get them to see what the children are going through, even though our motives might be pure, it is seen by our S as a way to manipulate them into changing their minds.

i realized that, and as soon as h came back from his trip i told him that, i felt i had forced him to say yes, and that in the past when i would get impatient i would force the issue, and that when i noticed i was doing that, i wanted to stop, and that if he didn't want to go, i would be ok with it because there was no point in going unless he was a willing participant.

i expected him to jump at the chance of not going, but he insisted that it would be good for us.now i am not sure what his motives are - he began by painting such a different picture than the real situation in there, that it freaked me out. he cannot even own what he is doing right now. it was surreal to sit in there and listen to him COMPLETELY leave the affair out of the picture and act as if this was a mutual separation

Regarding your M, do you want to reconcile it or do you simply want an amicable D?

i don't know what i want - all i know is that right now i am so freaked out, by realizing everything that happened that i want to get away from him as far as i can. amicable divorce to me means that i have to be this person who pretends that i'm ok with everything and acts it all day long while he gets the satisfaction of [censored] up and walking away.
i guess i am not able to forgive him right now.

I was overwhelmed by the way you describe the chaos and the craziness. It is a hard thing to live with but not impossible as you have been doing it for many years now.

How has that craziness affected you? Really affected you?

if you were overwhelmed by what i described - it was the tip of the iceberg - can you imagine how overwhelmed i was?

really affected me? i was in bad shape physically with effects of the accident, but then i developed a psychogenic movement disorder - that took me 5 years to come out of. i completely shut down, and h took on the role of being the ultimate care taker - making sure he told me everyday how f*cked and disabled i was

i've just realized this morning, what triggered off this within me - a combo of events, but the tipping straw was that right before he left yesterday the last thing he said (he brought up finances at the door and how he was taking care of things for the summer) was "you do realize that you're just not going to be able to make it on your own for a very long time, at least a couple of years, right"

that was his response after i had just told him that i had come up with some ideas to make some money this summer, and i was pretty excited about contributing.

I can tell you that simply leaving it isn't going to make it go away. It will still be there and it will still have the opportunity to take it's toll until you gain some understanding of the dynamics and decide how you are going to react to those dynamics.

i realize that i right now, i feel really trapped. s is deeply entangled with them and everyone tells me how much i will hurt him emotionally if i take him away from here.

i'm also scared that if i do try to do that, h will go for me, and use my psychological history to prove that i'm an unfit mother. it's been made very clear that h and i are to share s exactly equally -

h is a decent dad - and apparently he's making an effort to reconnect with s - at least that what it seems like.

i believe he knows what his behavior has done to me on some level, and part of his reasoning to leave is that he is not good for me, nor i for him

sadly he chooses, rather than to be good for me and stay and work it out, to take off

[b]Are the relationships you have with these people really serving you or are they hurting you?[/b]

i think they are hurting me right now -

i just had a long session with mil on the phone - all the [censored] came out - bucketfuls of it - and she acknowledged what i said about h, his father and his grandfather. she actually said at one point, that she and i had to save s. i told her how scared i was and wshe said that i needed to get away as far from her son as i could - that now she saw what he had done, and why i was so unhappy .

she asked m why i didn't get out years ago and i said i was too scared to face what i was seeing and didn't know how to.

she told me that about a week ago she saw all of this and that's when she started weeping uncontrollably - that she finally accepted that h and i weren't going to be able to get back together unless h really made the effort to change himself.

we screamed and yelled at each other until we came to this. she even said she understood if s and i never come over to them when s is with me (s and i have been there a lot - through most of this sitch h never took him there - i was the one keeping the contact consistent).

i guess i could go on and on, but there's too much

the main thing now is how to go LRT - without it affecting s - what do i tell s, what do i tell h?

i am not angry - i just know that the least amount of contact with h - even a simple phone call about s, and pickup, lands me in a mess, because the uses every opportunity to add something in there.

mil said that she thought h was really really scared right now. i am too -

thanks for stepping in here cat04 - i can't tell if i've totally lost perspective, or if i just got complete clarity

even during the conversation with mil, i kept feeling like she was turning my words around and making them sound different to what they really were. in the end i was sobbing sorry to her - and i'm wondering way happened there