Angel, so sorry to hear that, it is so difficult to see what our kids have to suffer in this!
7720, sorry to hear about your daughter as well, it seems that kids in this age range tend to be hit the worst by this. S10 does have quite a few friends and has them over to play nearly every day, but he doesn't know anyone around W's house. He probably feels much more comfortable at my house since he's in familiar surroundings and with his friends and may possibly resent having to go to W's house every other week. I’m going to try and have a delicate talk with him about this.
An update on my sitch (sit down, it’s going to be a long one)- First regarding S10, W was running late (as usual) last night and even though she has the kids this week she called at the last minute to see if I could take S10 to scouts (he and D16 still come to my house every day after school and W picks them up there). We were playing a Lego war game on the floor of his room that he made up (very cute!) and then I took him to scouts. We were joking around about the game all the way there and he seemed to be in a great mood. I stayed until W got there, chatted with her a few minutes and headed home to finish doing some laundry. W said when she was driving him home later that he went on another crying/ screaming tirade at her, told her he hated her for leaving, ruining his life and for making daddy cry. She asked him when was the last time I cried and he said the day she moved out (that was over 4-1/2 months ago). Actually the last time was about 2 weeks after that when I had to turn the kids over to W for the first visitation and was by myself for the first time in many years, but he wouldn't have known about that. Anyway, the point being that things that happened months ago are still fresh wounds to him. W is going to check into IC for him.
W and I did our RetroV dialoging last night and it segued into a really long conversation about our R. First let me say to those who are new to DB'ing, the following conversation is not something you should have with your spouse unless you think you're on the verge of piecing, otherwise it can be perceived by the WAS as pressure. W says she's still confused. She said she can't believe how "confident" and "collected" I am while she's still a train wreck. She said she wants to be where I am! I told her I feel that way because I've come to the realization that I will be fine with or without her (and it's true). She said that sometimes she wants to reconcile and other times she likes living on her own. I asked her what she liked about living on her own and she said “sometimes I just like to curl up on the couch and watch TV (this from the person that has always said she HATES TV and that if it were up to her she wouldn’t have one in the house). She said it’s just very confusing. I asked her why she’s confused and she said she’s afraid. I asked her what she’s afraid of and she said of hurting me and the kids. I told her that has already happened, so why is she still afraid of that and she said she didn’t know and started crying. So I held her until she could collect herself again, then asked where it was she saw herself in the future, what that looked like. She said she hadn’t thought about it. I asked her how she feels around me and she said “comfortable”. I asked her if this is different than she felt before and she said it was, that before she felt like she had to walk on egg shells all the time but she doesn’t feel like that anymore. I did some validating here, asking her how that had felt to her and telling her I understood why she felt that way. I mentioned her being afraid again and asked her to elaborate on that, she said she’s afraid of making the wrong decision and then said “but I remember what you said to me about that before”. She’s referring to a talk we had at RetroV in which I told her that there is no “right” or “wrong” decision because either choice will have pros and cons, and when we make a choice we should just accept it because we’ll never know what the outcome would have been had we made the other choice (in other words, we’ll never know if the other choice would have been better, so we should just accept the choices we make and do what we can with them). I asked her what she’s afraid of if we were to get back together and she said she’s afraid that SHE’LL act the same! I asked her if she thought that if she acted the same, did she think I would too and she said “no”. I said “then don’t you think that would change the dynamics?” She thought about it and said “yes”. So then I explained to her that the purpose of us opening up these new channels of communication is so that we can make sure the problems we had before will never happen again (just quickly, for those that haven’t followed my sitch my W secretly accumulated massive amounts of CC debt over the entire course of our M and was afraid to tell me, this is the “walking on eggshells” she’s talking about and she has now said was the biggest reason she decided to leave, she felt like she would always have to “walk on eggshells”). I told her that as far as I was concerned we’re already divorced other than some piece of paper somewhere in a government filing cabinet and that our goal isn’t to restore our old marriage, it’s to build a new one. And I told her that would include totally revamping the way we handle finances. I’ll spare you the details, but I described to her an overview of how it would work and the communication methods we would use to make sure we have total transparency going both ways. I also described to her how we would make sure she had plenty of money of her own to do the things that she wants to do (get her nails done, start hobbies, etc.)
After all this I expressed my own concerns to her. I told her that I know she doesn’t want to go back to the old M, but that I wanted her to know I don’t want that either. I am not interested in a M without love and passion, and I expressed to her that I had major concerns that she would have either for me again and that I couldn’t even remember the last time she had shown any. I asked her why she signed us up for RetroV and she said “I figured it couldn’t hurt.” I told her that if it was her intent to try to make the M work, that I needed to see more effort from her. I told her I’m not content to get back together just for the kids, I need to be in a truly loving, romantic, sexy relationship. I pointed out to her that last Sunday she came by my house and didn’t even come in to say hello, but sent D16 in to tell me they were going to lunch, and that I was disappointed they didn’t invite me and even more disappointed when S10 told me later that they had met OM for lunch. I told her “understand I am not hurt by this, I am well past being hurt by your actions. But these actions tell me that you feel nothing for me and are not interested in trying to build an R with me.” I told her the point I was making is that if she wants to try at the M like she says she does, then there needs to be action, not just talk.
At the end of all this she gave me a big hug and said “thank you for talking with me.” Somewhere in there she also invited me to Movie Studio Grill this Saturday with the kids, that was a nice gesture.
I asked her if she was committed to continuing the RetroV dialoging and follow-up sessions and she said that she was, and that she enjoyed them because we get to spend some quality time together. That was a surprise to me as it seems more like “homework” to me than quality time, but if she’s getting something more out of it then that’s a bonus.
So, we covered a lot of ground last night, LOL! I’ll be interested to see if she starts putting forth more effort now. Clearly we are not in a place where I can start pursuing her, so I’m going to maintain my distance and see if anything develops.
