Swimming with the Turtles

[zig]

yes your'e right - even in offering to take s, i was controlling what h decided to do with him after school.

that was in the beginning - then later it changed so that h set up his week so that he didn't have stuff in the evenings and i barely saw s. he did have the issue in jan when his teaching schedule changed and he had to teach until 5.30 and he asked if i would pick s up from school for those 2 days.

i happily agreed as then i got to see s during that week.

the first therapist i went to last august, told me to be as flexible as possible with s and h's schedule.

And if H always feels like his care of S isn't up to your standards and he's not doing it good enough...well I imagine that's not a feeling you want him to feel.

for sure - that's how i made him feel through the whole marriage - it really sucked what i did. and it's one of the first things i realized when i "woke up" with the bomb.

my big 180 has been never to question h about anything he has done with s at his house. not one thing. or even ask what they do. and whenever he does volunteer something about what they've done, i have responded really positively and said how wonderful it was.

.you do have to really honestly look at your motives...

if i were to be brutally honest - and this is the place to be that, i would say that for the longest time in the back of my mind i thought that getting h to come back was through s. so if i was "manipulating" or having misguided motives, i would say i was doing it then for those reasons.

i'm ashamed that i thought that way, now, and sad that i didn;t understand what that said about me. now i DON't feel like that and really understand that it's not about h coming back it's about BOTH OF US figuring it out together.

you know, i read other people's posts and they talk about how their WAS's call at random times to talk to their kids. ours is strange. there's this weird unspoken rule that we can only call s at bedtime to say goodnight. i think it's really sad that neither h nor i feel the freedom to call and talk to s when we would like to? i don't know if h would like to, but i would.

and also if the worst thing that happens is S has dinner at 9pm it's not the end of the world

yes i know - and i am so pleased that i have moved away from that kind of thinking. please understand - and i don't know if there are many of you out there who followed this way of parenting, but s was brought up with attachment parenting methods, as well as going to an alternative school with quite a different outlook on how kids are raised, compared to mainstream thinking. in that style, one focuses a lot on how the whole day goes, and stays away from disruptive evenings and bedtime schedules. we had very consistent schedules - and the reason i suggested it was because we could both see that s was much more tired than usual and it was getting to be a strain on him.

i will add - that it seems as if it was ME who chose all that - the parenting style etc - and h just went along with it, apparently. at least that was what i was given to understand at the time of the bomb. i bitched a lot if we didn't have dinner on time etc - i was so damned rigid - sigh!!

but the flexility that i have acquired and am able to practice now, is phenomenal compared to where i used to be. these issues don't come up for me any longer - and i will often have dinner with s really later myself.

i guess that i should point out that these were things in the early months of the sitch - in fact now, i would say i am the worse parent - letting s stay up late etc - - i've really learned to relax as a parent (and please take in the cultural differences too, i came from a world that raised children very differently from the way they are raised here - and sadly both h and i never considered that in our interactions)

so i guess i wrote way more than i warranted - but there it is.

i wonder if i am being defensive here.

i just feel a bit sad and hopeless right now - all of this discussion and trying to figure things out - all it shows me is how much i need to figure out myself and where i stand - i think that is the biggest work for me - it's not clear to me how all these things should be when one is confident , self secure and has good boundaries.