Wow, it feels good when all my peeps show up with such great advice! GB, job, AJ, FY, new New Yorker Heather, even MM! So glad to have all of you in my life. I never would have gotten to know any of you except for this rotten sitch, always some good in every bad!
I'm still not sure what I'm going to do. I guess I'll know more once I see my lawyer. D14 is with me this week and I was going to have to take her to school and come back 30 miles to see him but my D is not feeling well so now I don't need to get her to school. My glasses broke yesterday! Just snapped in half. Now I don't have the money to get new ones. Lucky for me, I don't need them except for distance and I actually pasted my driving test without them but I don't like to drive without them. I tried to repair them but no use. Just another small irritation.
I was thinking today about M. Not just mine but M is general. It occurred to me that whether or not you have a "good" or "bad" M is entirely up to you. Right now there are people whose S hits them or belittles them every day but if you were to ask them if they have a good M they would say yes, they do. Even if you were to point out that hey, this person treats you badly, they would defend them and maybe say something like "Yes, but he/she really does love me" or "Oh, that's my fault, if I were a better S they wouldn't have to do that". Just like so many things in life it's how YOU look at things that make something "good" or "bad". Especially when there isn't any overt abuse, when all that is going on is the little every day problems that would be there whether you were M or not.
It's ALWAYS a choice YOU make to see your M, your job, your home, your kids, really any part of your life (heck, your life in general) as either good or bad. We can choose to be happy even when things aren't going our way or choose to be unhappy even if they are. No one has the power to make any other person "feel" happy. The exact things that my W says are reasons why she needs to leave our M are the exact things that some other person would love to have someone willing to do for them, that would "make" them happy. It's truly up to each person to decide for themselves whether they are happy or unhappy. Have a great life or an awful one. Appreciate that they have someone in their life that loves them or look at that person as "in their way" from finding "joy". This is especially true when there isn't a OP in the picture. I guess if you are unhappy with your life and meet someone who "makes" you feel infatuation, you can start to think that your S is in your way, that this OP is the answer to true happiness. Stupid and in 99.999% of cases not at all a way to find lasting happiness but someone in crisis could think that way.
No, I guess I'm just realizing that my W made the choice to have the M she did. It was always up to her if she had a good M or bad one. The thing is that goes the same for us LBS's. WE have the choice to see our lives as "good" or "bad" now that our S's have run away. We have the same choice now that we did in our M. I always choose to see my M as good. To see my W as the good person who I loved, warts and all as they say. I could have looked for only the bad. Saw things she did or said that weren't positive, M enhancing things as "making' our M "bad". But instead I tried to understand that no one is perfect, we all make mistakes or act badly sometimes. Even when she was depressed and was doing things almost every day that made things harder, I "choose" to see that as part of her depression and not a reason for me to want to end our M.
So, now that my M is ending, I still have the same choices I have always had. I can choose to see my life as "bad", my W as "bad" or I can choose to see that my life is going to be as good as I see it as being. That my W is still the same person she always was (although acting quite differently) and isn't "bad" or "good"...she just is who she is. It's totally up to me how I see her. It's totally up to me how I see myself. I can choose to be happy or unhappy no matter what is going on around me. I guess it's time to decide to do just that!
