Hello TVS, Thanks for your concern. Got a little busy as with my parents in town and my daughter's grad I haven't had much time. It's been a highly emotional week. The school my D is grad from has MANY traditions and there has been al least 2 events a day for the last 5 days! It's fun though. There are kids from 12 different countries in her grad class. It took a lot of sacrifice to pay for her to go there but I really think the broad range of cultures and the high level of education she has been exposed to will give her a head start in life.
The hardest part has been how distant my W has acted through the whole thing. I had looked forward to sharing this time with her, to have a shared sense of how we worked together to get her here. Didn't have any of that. The way she is acting is like she gets angry because my D is closer to me than her. Since she has been on her MLC journey for the last few years, I have been the one who takes my D to school functions, friends homes, go to her games or plays, etc. so I know all her friends and even some teachers much better than she does and it bothers her now. I will say my D had a couple friends over after the party we had last night and my W would usually not interact with them and would complain she wanted to go to bed and want them to leave. Last night she sat and talked to everyone and showed old pictures of our D and was much more like her old self. It was nice to see this version of her come out, even if it was just for one night.
In 2 days my parents will be gone and my FIL will come. I really am not looking forward to dealing with him and since my youngest will be grad from the school SHE has been at for the last 8 years and one of our kids have been at for last 12 there will be many events that I have been looking forward to going to where he will be there and without fail, my W acts like a jerk when she's around him. He has this way of saying something insulting and adding "...I'm just saying...." after, like that makes it OK and my wife starts doing the same thing. To give you an example, when my W was a stay at home mom he sat at my dinner table in front of her and my kids and I and said how embarrest he was when his friends ask what his D is doing, "I have to tell them she does nothing but sit at home all day, I'm just saying.....". He has told her cousins that my D who just graduated will "never amount to anything" and her life will be waste based on the fact that she went through a rough period of rebellion when she was 15-16 but has since gotten herself together and is graduating with a 3.8 GPA from a very intensive academic school. He has seen her maybe 6 times in the last 4 years and even my W has told him how well she is doing but he has decided this is who she is and that's that.
While my parents have always treated my W well, her dad has always been insulting and a jerk towards not just me but my D's as well. My D doesn't even want him to be a part of her grad but he's coming to help her mother find a place to move now that school is out. Thing is my D has told my W she doesn't want him there. She is "creeped out" by him (her words) but my W insists on having him there.
This will be hard for me as he has tried for many years to get my W to leave both me and her kids so she can "make something" of her life and he doesn't think being a parent is a worthy thing. Kids just hold you back in life. He had little to do with his kids from the time my W was 10 until he realized he may need her help when he gets old and now is pushing her to leave us and travel with him. It will be hard to just tune him out and I'm sure he will say or do something insulting to me, my D and our family as he always does!
Right after B-day my W started saying that because she would need money for living on her own and since without the 2 of us being able to take her to school and pick her up (at that time she thought my D's would choose to live with her, since than they have made it known they would choose to stay with me) my youngest wouldn't be able to go to the school her sister has. She kept trying to say how the public school where she wants to move is just as good. That stopped about 2 months later and she said she would help pay if I would as well to send her. After returning from her trip to her see her father, she once again changed her mind and told me all she was willing to do was pay for books! As I have listened to my D talk about how she is so excited about going to this school, doing the things her sister is doing and knowing that unless I can find some way to make a lot more money over the next couple months or her mother changes her mind again and becomes willing to help pay, she won't be able to go, it breaks my heart! How can her mother just not care how disappointed she is going to be? Sure, it's her choice if she wants to make the sacrifice but the hard part is up until B-day, it was a given my D would be going. How does someone change their core values so quickly? How can they vassilate from saying yes and then say no just a few weeks later with something as important as this? My W has truly become a stranger, become just like the person she swore she would never be like (her father) and it really hits home that the person she is becoming isn't one I want as my S. The values we had always shared (al least she said she shared) no longer have meaning to her. If they do, they are much less important than they used to be.
In a way it helps me see that it's more important than ever for me to build my life as if she no longer existed. To think how I would act and what I would do if say she just disappeared one day and work on doing those things. At the same time, she IS still around and I know how her actions will hurt my D and how that will make her feel and wish there was a way to save her from that pain. I've seen how the way her dad treated her has affected my W all her life, how she craved his attention even as he said and did hurtful things. How hard it is for her to trust people and I don't want my D to go through that later in her life. All I can do is try to be the best parent I can be. To be a stable force in her life.
I know I haven't been a perfect husband and father, it's just not possible for anyone to be perfect at anything. I'm not that stupid or deluded. There are always ways to be better, things I did I shouldn't have done or things I didn't do I should have. That's life. But when you live with someone for more than 20 years, who you chose to spend your life with based on the values you shared and lived by and suddenly that person says those values no longer hold any meaning to them. That they have no control over how they feel, they feel this new way and there's nothing to be done about it, it's confusing and painful. Right now, knowing that in the next couple weeks, I will have to tell my D she won't be going to the school she thought she was and will also have to deal with my W leaving the only home my D has ever known and will be asked to split her time between her mom's home and her own. How hard is that going to be for a 14 year old who loves both her parents and has heard from both her mother and I how we would never let that happen? Her mother more strongly than me.
These are the things that weigh heavily on me at the moment. As for me having to live on my own, no longer part of a team but now a single dad trying to start over, that is something I know I can do. As much as I love my W still, I know that she isn't the person I married and while there may come a time when she comes out of the MLC fog she seems to be stuck in, that time may never come. Even when she does, she won't be the same person and if the way she has shed the very things that I loved most about her now is any indication, I may not even want that person back in my life. All I can do is become the person I most want to be. For my D's, they only get one mother. She will always be their mother and they will have to live with the person she becomes for the rest of their lives. I pray that person is a loving, caring, involved mother who has good values and lives by them.
