Keep breathing...

[mamabird]

I called MIL yesterday and wished her happy birthday (left her a message) and told her to call me any time. I'm afraid that if I pursue things with her too much it will upset my H and make it seem like I am "going around him". Which, I guess I would be.

Admittedly, MIL is a little odd. First of all, she abandoned her children so that in and of itself is a pretty big red flag. She's pretty selfish and hasn't done much to change that over the years, although she has apologized to H and his sister. But she still does weird stuff. She lives 1 1/2 hours away from us and would come down here to get her hair cut, 10 min from our house and not call. That's just odd.

H is a big grudge holder for sure. He said he did forgive me for not behaving well around OM1 (ignoring H's feelings) but when we went to MC back in July, she called him out on that, saying she didn't think he had forgiven me. Then he decided he didn't like that therapist. I also think that H has not processed his feelings around his mother. I can't say that with 100% accuracy but it seems to be the case.

He has a pattern of sticking his head in the sand. First with mother, then with finances (he had bad credit when we started dating and he told me), then continued that in our M - never told me when he was unhappy, just swallowed it. Now again with the finances. The Ostrich, we can call him.

25, you are right about wiping the slate clean for his own sake as well as the sake of our M. I have asked him to put everything behind a door for now and close it, so we can move forward. Whether we can do that or not remains to be seen. The channeling that I had back in July told me that H slides between extreme self deprecation and extreme arrogance, which is just basically going between beating yourself up and beating others up, but none of that solves the real problem of his insecurity. My father says H really punishes himself, and I can see that to be true.

Hopeful, as far as other grudges are concerned, I'm sure there are many. One time he was pretty sick and we had to go to the hospital. The kids were much younger then, and I asked him to join us at the table for dinner (if he could). He didn't want to and I guess I got upset at him for that. Then I jokingly said to him later "You ruined my whole day." He knows it was a joke but still was upset about it. He still brings this up as a character defect on my part. He doesn't talk about the time on Xmas day when he had the flu and I took care of everything and let him rest.

We've all done sh!tty things at one time or another. Maybe I've done more than my fair share. But I think the key is to ask ourselves why we do what we do. Are we bad people? Or are our situations coloring our behavior? And if it's situational, what can we do to change the situation? Can we change our behavior and reactions? Do we even want to change? I am willing to give him (us) the benefit of the doubt and roll up my sleeves and get to work. He doesn't see that there can be change and he's happy to leave it at that. Wish I could get him to read 5LL so he'd understand my love tank was empty...