Maybell XXXII

[Maybell]

Today was a weird busy day. I started it off touring the house I'm REALLY hoping to get and having breakfast with my friend, and then I spent the rest of it clearing up the house, doing laundry, and trying to start working my way towards being ready to move. Reviewing the budget and finances and running models to see if it's remotely possible for me to do all this.

So when STBX dropped the kids off tonight I wasn't very nice. I wasn't rude, but I clearly didn't want to look at him or smile at him or really talk to or acknowledge him in any way. When he brings them home I wish he'd drop them off, hug and kiss them, and then go. But he lingers around. He kind of half smiles at me. I wish he'd just GO. He wanted this. I can't be friendly to him when I've been scouring Craigslist for rentals and fielding Zillow links from D12 because she's so anxious to know where we're going to live.

I want to be more remote and less hostile when I see him, but I can't be detached when I am because in my head we click so well that I can't understand why we're divorcing.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think this is reparable. He will always be the guy who fell in love with a woman so remote that he only actually laid eyes on her four times but she was apparently the love of his life. I'll never unsee the sexts he exchanged with her while we were on our family vacation. I'll never forget how I asked him NOT TO CALL HER when I was confronting him about the communications from her baby daddy and HE CALLED HER RIGHT THERE WHILE I WAS TEXTING HIM and told me how wonderful she was. It has taken a ton of work to come back to enjoying the books, shows, music, and activities that I prefer without feeling like I should be watching the ones he encourages so that he'll think more highly of me. I should never have felt like he thought poorly of me for enjoying my own tastes in the first place anyway.

He treated me with profound disrespect and contempt and that is not reparable. And I made such a fool of myself before he moved out that I think (I know, mind-reading) that if I let down my guard even a little that he'll think I either 1) agree with him that breaking up our family is for the best or 2) care so much about him that I'm willing to let myself be treated that way just to get a few crumbs of his sunshine. It's probably mind-reading but I think he thinks it's so wonderful that he broke free and found his liberty and "himself" that I should just come around to his way of thinking and then we can be super-sophisticated buddy-exes like the evolved, rational people are.

I do NOT want to be his friend. If I didn't have to share my kids with him, I'd like him to walk off and never show his face to me again. I wish I didn't even have to hear his name again. It sounds like poison to me.

(which, by the way, gives me a funny little issue... I don't intend to change my name back for a number of reasons, but the sound of my own name chokes me a little now. But my maiden name does too, because I feel like my parents have really let me down through all this. And that name doesn't feel like mine anymore either.)

Still, I don't like being so hostile, although I AM doing it for my own self-protection. It gives him a sense of being more powerful than he deserves. It makes me look kind of petty and unforgiving. It makes me feel like a person I don't want to be after he leaves. But I don't want to be any nicer to him. I hate that he is putting me through this. It's maybe not OK, but I want to be absolutely sure that he does not think I am AT ALL OK with the choices he's made. I don't want him to think for one bloody little second that I am willing to be friendly to a guy who cheated on his wife and tore up his children's home without even investigating how he could make his life work without destroying so much. I wouldn't treat an acquaintance with his history any friendlier than I treat him. Maybe I'm being self-righteous.

I feel like I should communicate some of this to him so that I can relax my shielding and behave more neutrally to him while knowing that he is aware of my position and that the adjustment in my attitude towards him is for me and not him. On the other hand, if he's as narcissistic as I suspect, it won't matter to him any more than the other times I've told him what I am angry about. He'll just congratulate himself for taking it on the chin and being evolved about things.

Please don't redirect me to IC again. I'm not going back soon. I just want to get moved and divorced (or divorced and moved) and start my own life without having all this hanging over me. I don't want to make myself all vulnerable to another stranger (yes, I know, IRONY) and maybe have to do that 2-3 times or more, paying $100/pop for the privilege of baring my soul in the hope I'll get help and the suspicion I'll just be taken advantage of again. I just want someone to tell me how to conduct myself.

I tried SO HARD to be a good wife. I tried to pay attention to what he needed and what we needed and to build a way of being together that was satisfying to both of us. I don't think I could have succeeded. I should have known that he hates intimacy (hence the much younger woman he interacted with electronically who lived in a foreign country and could never get any closer to him than sex in a hotel room with nothing of their real lives around; ditto the one-night stands).

The last MC we went to (that ended up being so weird with me at the end) told STBX that even if we didn't stay married that he was sure we'd be friends. I told him I never would be and MC contradicted and disagreed with me. MAYBE in 3-5 years, when my feet are under me I might be able to have a family dinner with him without choking on my meal, but no time soon, and when he lingers around like that I feel like he's waiting for me to say something friendly to him to let him know I've moved on.

I don't even want to call him names anymore. I just wish he was a much better quality person. I'm sad and disappointed and disgusted that this is as much imagination as he has. That he doesn't realize how different life could be for him. That he didn't want what I tried to offer. And that he didn't have more compassion and care for me, that I meant so little to him after the investments I made in our life together.