Living, Getting the Paperwork Started (20 months)

[adinva]

Thanks Cat, you're like that old tv show with the angel that pops up out of nowhere when needed, was it the one with Michael Landon? Anyway,

I currently feel like it is unreasonable of me not to share the driveway as BIL is used to being able to park there and it is just a minor annoyance to me. Also he is still the boys' uncle even if he has been my H's free legal advisor in the process of leaving us, which makes me just want to vomit on him. I justify it to myself as this: I need to work on the logs before the splinters. Get H to sell me the house, get a settlement agreement signed, begin a truly separated life, and then tell H he needs to offer his own driveway to his brother because it is really imposing for him to offer mine. Details, minor details.

H does still think of our house as his. He's still paying the mortgage after all, so I understand why he thinks that way. He walks right in, and lights right into the boys and me about things he doesn't like, just like old times. I have suggested to him a couple different things: enter as respectfully as if he's entering a friend's house, remember that he doesn't live here and so does not get to have an opinion about what we store in the basement or whether some item hasn't been put away yet, empathize or at least pretend to empathize that we are not here waiting for him to come set things straight we are real feeling thinking beings having a life that he is entering in the middle of - maybe ask us what's new or how we're doing before yelling about his own issue. It's a work in progress. Originally I was hitting each conflict head on and addressing it at the time, but I felt I was nit-picking, so I had one good big-picture conversation about how he was coming across and what we expected going forward. But how he is with me is 100x more respectful than how he is with S15. When I'm not there it's bad. S15 just tries to be gone, and only ran into him this past weekend because there was no set schedule for H to come by. And that was on purpose. I would have liked to send in Nana from Peter Pan but all I had to send over was Cerberus the zombie doberman.