melissa, continued . . .

[melissag]

So, here is his entire email. It makes me sad because I want to believe that we could actually have a conversation and work things out, but what I have learned over the past five months is that my H cares about one thing, far above all else: himself. Also, I don't know what to believe because he has lied and tried to manipulate me so many times. I honestly don't know if he is even capable of having such a conversation. Thus far, he has been hell bent on keeping up that story in his head where he is the victim and I am the horrible person. And he has showed that if I am vulnerable and share something with him, he throws it back in my face later.

Four hours before he wrote that email, he was refusing to talk to me and sending me nasty texts. Then he tells the kids on his own (after many discussions where we agreed that needed to be done together), and now he decides to go the nice route?

(Note that even in the "nice" route, he has to deflect the blame.)

I don't want to hate you. I don't want to spend the rest of my life at war with you. There was a point where I loved you a great deal. This [censored] and it's making me miserable. Good, you may be saying, you're making me miserable as well. Perhaps.

I want to call a truce, but I can't. I don't know what you want and I don't know what I can give you to get that truce. Maybe you want to scare the crap out of me and limit my time with my kids. Maybe you're just scared yourself and you're trying to hold onto whatever you can. Maybe you think that what you're doing is in the best interests of your children. I don't know, because I don't know what you want. And it scares the crap out of me because I don't know what you're going to try to take from me.

I've been thinking about how all you had to do was ask me for what you wanted. I don't want you to suffer. I don't want the kids to suffer. But I have no idea what you want. And when you hire lawyers and try to bully me? I don't want to give anything to you now. I know that I haven't been particularly nice in response and I may have bullied you back. I'm sorry for having done that. This hasn't been easy for me either. But I'd like to ask you for what I want. Will you please agree to joint custody with me? I love those children and they are, by far, the most important things in my life. They're not your kids. They're our kids. And they need me as much as I need them. Please don't fight me on joint custody.

Tonight S7 broke down because I told him that if he could turn the lactose free milk into butter, I'd make lactose-free crepes for dinner, and he couldn't do it. And he screamed and cried in his room for about five minutes and I finally went in to talk to him and he told me that he was really upset because he hadn't had crepes for five months and he really wanted crepes. It turned out he wasn't so much upset about the crepes as he was about me not being there for the past five months. We talked about it for awhile and D9 came in and I talked to her about it. I told them that I'm not moving home and that it's permanent. I told them that you and I both love them a tremendous amount. I told them that you're a really strong person and that when I'm with you, it's hard for me to be me. They get that because they can see the differences in me. They don't like it a lot, but I think they get it. S7 asked me to call him or FaceTime him at night because he misses me, so I'll be doing that more. I hope that that will be OK on the nights that I'm not there. I told them that I didn't know when they would be over here and not over here - that you and I were trying to work that out. I'm sorry that you weren't there for this conversation, but I'm not sure that you really could have been. D9 clearly understands now that it's permanent, although I never used the word divorce. Despite telling S7 a couple of times that I wouldn't be coming home, I'm not sure he still fully gets it.

The conversation really hammered home to me that they need both of us. Not just me and not just you. And they need us to get along. Next to that I think it means dickall whether they have one "home base" or two "home bases." But if that's what you truly believe, talk to me about it. Tell me what you think and why you think it. Maybe we can think of some alternative that we both agree is best for the kids. Maybe we can't. It's possible that we're both deadset in our thinking and there's nothing either one of us can do to change the other's mind and we should make a court decide who's right. But it can't hurt to try.