My WAW story

[mtb1981]

Thanks for the feedback, guys!

Now to answer some of your questions. Her contact with the kids hasn't been the greatest. In the beginning, she was coming home and staying a couple of days during the week. She would watch the kids while I went to work. I am a teacher. Since school has let out, and I am home all the rime her visits have dwindled to one night every 2 weeks. She will come home late on a Friday night, usually after the kids have already went to bed, hang out with them for a couple of hours in the morning, and then leave after lunch to "go back to work". I put that in quotes because there have been times she says she has to work and I find out later that she didn't. Also, i nthe beginning when I was calling her or she would call me, we would talk, but she would rarely ask to speak with the kids. I usually had to ask her if she wanted to say hi to them. In the past couple of weeks she has been asking to talk with them a lot more. Maybe because she isn't as home as much as she was in the beginning. There is no visitation schedule set up. She just comes and goes as she pleases.

The biggest change I have made is that I basically quit drinking. I used to drink onn a daily basis. Mostly by myself when I got home from work. Now i drink maybe once every 2 weeks if i go out with friends. I also joined the gym and am in the best shape I have been in since high school. Before this, i was pretty sedentary. I have actually lost about 40 pounds bc of working out and quitting drinking.

I have discussed moving to st. Louis or at least closer there recently, but I'm not sure she wants me there anymore. In the past, she had mentioned that we should move to St. Louis, but it made no sense at the time. She was a SAHM and I have tenure at the school I teach at. My main goal is to be able to provide for my family. It didn't seem logical to give up my job and move to St. Louis just because she thought it was more exciting there. She worked part time for a staffing company and occasionally would go there to do some banquet serving or bartending and she just thought St. Louis was the greatest place on Earth. I just couldn't justify uprooting my family on that basis alone.

As far as if this is my new reality, will I be able to cope with it? I believe I am already there. In the past week, I have accepted the fact that she probably won't come back, so I need to do what is best for me and the kids.

I think my major fault in the M was not really listening to her needs and being a bit of a control freak. I handled situations poorly and came across as demeaning and uncaring. I should probably mention that my wife has been struggling with an addiction to pain killers (Vicodin specifically) for the past couple of years. For about as long as we have been having marital troubles. I believe this has some to do with waht we have been going through. Don't get me wrong, I fully understand that my actions have added to it as well. I could have dealt with the situation better than I did. Basically, she would sit around all day eating pills and watching TV. I don't want to come across as an a**, but she really didn't do much of anything. In the morning before I left for work i had to basically force her out of bed to take care of the kids. I didn't want them to be running around unsupervised while laid in bed asleep. I would tell her she needed to get up, she would say she was and fall back asleep. This cycle would repeat until I was to the point of being rude. When I got home from work, the dishes from breakfast would be pushed to the middle of the table and the dirty dishes from lunch would still be sitting on the table. She would be sitting n theliving room watching TV, and the kids would be in their room coloring on the walls. When I say nothing was being done while I was gone, I mean nothing. I tried to discuss withh her that as a SAHM she should be trying to get something done during the day. She would agree, and nothing would change. Eventually, i got so frustrated that my asking nicely would turn into complaints, criticisms, and demands. This happened for quite awhile. Eventually, it got to the point where I was angry bc she sat aound not doing anything, and she was angry bc I was always complaining about her not doing anything. Finally, I quit complaining and just took care of things myself. When I got home, i would clean up the mess on the table and around the house, cook dinner, feed the kids, give them baths, and get them ready for bed. While drinking beer the whole time. I think i drank bc it just made me numb to the whole situation. After reading 5LL, i have now realized there was a serious lack of communication and we were not speaking each others love languages. If i would have spoken her love language, she would have been more willing to do the things i was asking for ( my love language). Problem avoided, but there's nothing I can do about that now but make the positive changes i am making to make sure that doesn't happen again if i get the chance to have a new relationship with her.

Looking back, she made an attempt to make things better, and i didn't reciprocate as well as i could have. This past December she had a moment of clarity and realized she had a serious addiction. She wanted to get off the pills bc they " took her to a dark place" she didn't like. She went to stay with her grandma to detox for a week. A couple weeks later i found a bottle of pills in the house and threw them away. The next day, she asked what happened to thepills. I told her that I threw them away and she became irate claiming that she needed them to giveto a friend that was having pain trouble and that she wasn't going to take any. I just told her to forget about the pills, if her friend needed pillsshe needed to see a doctor. She got over this in the next few days. January was the best month we had in quite awhile. She was a completely different person. Happy and productive. Our sex life picked up again. Things were going great. I noticed and appreciated her changes, but i failed to make the necessary changes of my own. We got into a fight on Feb 3, and a few days later I noticed a change in her behavior and found a bottle of pills that were filled on the 4th. She assured me that she was going to tell me about them when she thought the time was right. That she needed them for her back. (she broke her back 10 years ago in a car wreck and has had some pain due to it) that she wasn't going to take the like she had been. She would get a month's script and have them all gone in 2 weeks and go see another doctor or get sone from her friends. I told her she was an adult and she could do what she wanted, but that she needed to be careful because addiction is a slippery slope. She assured me everything would be fine. Onn the 12th i came home that evening from the grocery store to her passed out watching tv, while the kids were running around soaking wet. They had demolished the bathroom and flooded the toilet. There was standing water in the bathroom and it was going all down the hall. I trie to wake her up and she would look at me with a blank stare for a few seconds and then go back to sleep. Needless to say, i was pretty upset, so i didn't really want to talk to her thenext couple of days. I needed to calm down and I didn't want to have a blowout fight. The 14th was Valentine's Day, and I had calmed down. And was ready to talk again. My oldest S10 from a previous relationship had a basketball game and my wife said she didn't want to go and wanted to stay home. So I took the 2 youngest kids with me to the game and when I got back home at 7 she was not home. So now i'm upset bc she can't go the the game with her family, but she can go out and do other things. Sge finally came home around 10:30 and I was already in bed. She came in being all nice and I basically blew her off bc I was upset at how our Valentine's day had went. We had plans to go out of town on the 16th to a concert. This trip was my Valentine's Day present to her. I felt bad about blowing her off on the 14th and was looking forward to making things right on this trip. When I got home on the 16th and was getting ready for our trip, she informed me that she didn't want to go. That she was going to st. Louis to stay with her uncle bc she was mad at me. The next day i noticed that she changed her relationship status on facebook from married to single. I called her to ask what was going on and she told me over thephone that we were done. She was staying in stl with her uncle and the staffing company she worked for was going to be finding her work there.........and here we are 4 months later.

Sorry for being so long, but once I started, i couldn't stop. Looking back i noticed many times i could have handled certain situations much better and probably prevented all of this. Like they say, hindsight is 20/20.

Again, thank you everybody for your input. I ordered DR on amazon a few days ago and it can't get here quick enough