Rough night last night! After finally getting to sleep, I was woken up by a very loud mouse chewing somewhere very near by! Ah, the fun of country living!
Thanks LT and miage, I do understand what you are saying and as I try to step back, lower the anger levels, detach, I find myself having to fight battles that I already have fought , that I thought were behind me. It seems I just can't make any progress forward and must keep having to go back and re fight things that I truly thought were settled. It doesn't help that I found my old journals and have been reading just how much pain and trouble my W put all of us through back in 2006-2010 when she was "clinically depressed". I had forgotten just how bad things had become with my W. How she stopped being anything. She wasn't a wife, she wasn't a mother, she was hardly a person! Without me she couldn't have survived, she would have had to be put away or go stay with a relative as she couldn't take care of herself, let alone 2 D's under 13 years old. I can't wrap my head around the fact that I had real reasons to leave her back then. No one would have blamed me for just giving up on her. But I wasn't going to do that. I wasn't going to abandon her when she needed me most, no matter how she was acting. What's my 'reward'? A selfish, two faced overly entitled child who holds her breath if she doesn't get her way and is reliving her childhood with a new mommy and a daddy that loves her. Who wants to have her d14 but not do what she needs for her, she can still count on me for that.
So far in this D, it's like the end of our M. She does whatever she wants, doesn't take responsibility for the day to day things for her D14 and gets away with it because she knows I'll still step up and do the things for her just like I have always done. I only allowed her to put my D14 into a school 30 miles away because from the start she said I was going to get the house. I thought that the fact that my D14 would at least have something that hadn't totally changed in the last year, an island of stability in a sea of change. She lives 7 days in one place, the next 7 30 miles away! She can never settle down and just have some stability in her life! It's like she is always half packed and after only 3 weeks is already getting tired of it.
All my greatest fears are coming true, one by one. My W isn't stepping up to be a "better" mother and is using the fact that I will take care of doing things like take her to the eye Dr., pick her up for school, even when she is with her mother and she should be doing these things, she has taken advantage of me trying to be reasonable "for the sake of the kids". It just seems like I'm being punished for trying to be a good husband and father.
I need to take away her power. To do that I need to think in ways that I'm not used to thinking. Like how to get over on my W. How to lie to her face while I'm doing the opposite behind her back, like she is doing to me. It's not in my nature to act this way. I'm a very up front do what I say kind of person. I need to think outside my usual ways and think what will make my W understand just how awful she is acting. I still refuse to put my D14 in the middle even though it seems her mom isn't above doing that. Other than that, I will need to do whatever it takes. If that means hurting my W by bringing out things she'd rather keep private, that is her fault for backing out of her agreements. If you can't keep your word, you shouldn't expect to not have to pay.
I need to sit down and rebutt everything that my W's lawyer said in his response. Just the facts and not the distortions. I need to find my calm center and just take this step by step.
Thanks guys. I really do know that I'm tearing myself up inside by letting all this get to me. I just find it so very hard that my W no longer can think of what's best for anyone but herself, even her D14 isn't as important as her getting what she feels so entitled to for no real reason. At first I thought that maybe she really felt that she was doing what SHE felt was best for her D but now I know it was never that. Time to just get centered and act.
