Separation at 17.5 months

[adinva]

I've spent my whole lunch time reading so I don't have much time to write. Here's some of where we started.

When I went upstairs to not allow my H to get away with separating from me *via email* (insert outraged emphasis), and I simply started out by saying, so you sent me a separation agreement by email, I admitted to IC this was probably passive aggressive. I thought so because I wasn't saying what I meant, I was hoping to convey by my tone and word choice that I was angry about what he did. She said that wasn't passive aggressive, it was perhaps all I could manage at the time to bring it up because I was too mad to say anything more productive. So I wisely waited. I didn't know I was wisely waiting...

But she's right. Because if I had said more than, it would have been how cowardly I thought it was, how he was not the man I had thought he was, and what a crummy jerk he was. I could have expressed that as an "I" statement, ie "I feel like you are a crummy coward." when what I needed to get to was "I feel hurt and disrespected that you didn't give me enough credit to look at me face to face when you gave me a separation agreement." I need to express to him how I feel, not what I think he is. It's not to insult him, it's to increase my self esteem that I did deserve more and I don't mind speaking up and letting him know that.

I think I was masking "I feel hurt" with "you're a real [expletive]." In time I have calmed down and I can decide if I'm able to communicate to him what I think of dropping your wife of almost 20 years via email.

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We talked a lot about telling the kids, and I've come to being ready to tell them if this weekend it seems like the bachelor behavior is still going on, or even if it's not, if I just have come around to thinking it's time, I can decide that. IC asked me what I'll tell them, and I thought and tried, "Dad and I have been having some problems, and we just haven't been able to resolve them, so we are working on separating. We will probably make some changes between now and the end of the month. You kids and I will be staying at this house, and dad will move out. We both love you and we'll both always be your parents. Do you have any questions?" IC asked me what questions I expected and I said, "Why?" and she told me I had already answered that. Why, is because we have problems we cannot resolve. That's enough. Later she said I may want to share more with them about how much I didn't want this and how hard I tried to work on things, maybe even how I didn't agree with how H handled things, but she said for now the first sentence was enough Why.

She really liked that I enforced the boundaries I set, and modelled for the kids how to respectfully deal with rude behavior with out escaping the entire discussion that it was a part of.