Anxiously waiting for it to fall apart

[25yearsmlc]

[quote=dejavu2]Really struggling tonight. H has got interest from a company 5,000 miles away(8 hr time diff). How can he expect to be a part of kids lives? (Note he is talking to some companies which would only be 5hr time zone diff). Divorce me - fine! But walking out on the children stinks! He is blaming me that I won't move to US so that kids can be near him.


I refuse to take the kids away from the only life they know and their friends on the chance he will spend time with them when not too busy traveling with work.



are there NO other advantages to moving to the US? Think about that. The set up of the family life is such that his high income is like a golden handcuff

and the geographical (and time zones!!) difference sound to me like a family structured for failure.

We were a military family so I'm quite familiar with moves and living abroad. But h's deployments were few & far between, thank God. There was always an end in sight as it was not a modus operandi.

Not a "life style" for us. Meaning, we were usually together - but in a new place.
I joined the military myself after awhile b/c if you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

Had to resign when they could not keep us together any longer. Keeping the family together was key.

In some ways you must congratulate yourself on staying married so long when he's only around 4-6 days a month? Good grief, how could you stay connected that way?

My h's last deployment to the middle East was estranging in so many ways. A lot happened that he was not a part of and he went thru a lot that I was not a part of.

VERY dangerous to marriages. And this was after we reconciled and were in a good strong place in our marriage.

Are you American? If so, won't the kids have some extended family around by moving back? And won't you have more emotional support in America?

I know that child support is a lot easier to enforce if you're in the same country.

Seems to me that the marriage has one consistently big underlying problem, which is that he's far away. This has to have been working for you, b/c you don't seem to mind him being "Just 5 time zones away".

Seems to me if you could show some willingness to change that underlying problem, it would help. What's stopping you from movement in any direction? I mean, it sounds as if you are saying "If this, THEN I'll be willing to ---" and so you want him to make the first step, etc.

But he's not here trying to save the marriage; you are. So you have to take the first step and the second, and maybe the next 1000...

Change is coming to your family anyhow, why not direct it as best you can?


He found very little time over the past 3 yrs to spend with them as work is a huge identity point for him.

Yes he loves his work, so you said. But let's be careful to avoid glossing over actions that are in effect, punitive.

There's a good chance he wants to be closer to the kids than he is. A very good chance. You've seen some changes in him already.

Maybe if you back off and then you're not there to enable or direct the father/child contact, he'll take more of a role in doing so.

When I backed off from forcing h and the kids to interact on MY schedule or what I perceived to be theirs, h stepped up to the plate.

But there was a lag time during which he expected me to continue doing it and I wasn't.
I was very tempted to resume my formal level of "controlling interference" (which it was, in actuality)

Then it took time for him to process that, without anger, and then some more time for him to step up to the plate. But it did happen.
--

I realise that he is in the selfish man-child phase but making decisions which take him out of his children's lives is just wrong.

You have not been on this site for long, though your h has been half way out of the marriage for some time.

My comment is NOT intended as a criticism but a reminder...here it is.

How does making him "wrong" help YOU? It doesn't. It does 2 harmful things

1) it keeps you stuck in your anger at him and

2) keeps your focus on HIM instead of you...

You need to start YOUR Journey and not worry about his.