Hi friends. Toots, Fogg, Tlee, all the rest who bother to read...thank you. It is nice to know our little journals have some relevance to each other. I am trying to restrict my time here and channel it more productively, so this is a bit of a long post coming up.
Closure is something you give yourself.
And so, there is a family law mediator/attorney who will be working to put this thing to bed. I am lucky to be well loved (who is the narcissist now, huh? :)) and so these services have been offered to me at no cost by this dear semi-retired friend. He will be contacting STBX to see if he can ease any of his 'legal fears' (last great 'rational' opposition to finishing what he started - when he demanded I sign this stuff, he certainly didn't seem very fearful).
If the man refuses reason, I am prepared to file.
I also have requested that H does not show up unannounced again and will take responsibility for his things within 15 days and remove them from my home. No more threats about he will get his things whenever the He&& he feels like it, or 'drowning' me in legal bills if I insist.
Will the real H please stand up?
I submit that people are incredibly complicated. For instance, if I saw STBX pull up in the driveway, I might wish to vomit, kick him in the nuts, and hope for a bouquet of flowers and heartfelt words - all at the same time! Surely, his head is a mess too. Or incredibly vacant if he's the sociopath I think he is.
Depending on whom he's talking to, I am
a)manipulative and evil to our friend he parceled out by sympathy for his suicidal thoughts, how bad I was for him (the ones I heard about only in fights)
b)perfect for him pre-accident (not post)to our closest friends that night, but spookily showed no emotion - and accused me of cheating
c)someone he still loves, and recognizes he is an angry person, and never wanted his marriage to end this way most recently to a friend who loved our love story. and when friend asked him what he was doing to work on himself, and put it back together, blankness. Not interested in discussing that. As though all those powerful feelings never caused him to consider such a thing, were off the subject for his image management
d) unfortunately another victim of the accident, the accident messed him up!
BUT TO ME: e) our marriage has been awful Z, D is the only way; I want to sleep with others, I DID mean everything I said when I came home, but bc you brought the fight to me...I have no remorse for the things I did to you that night. It was the last straw for me. ...later via text, the last thing I heard from him among threats and more abuse was that he was soo much better off without me.
I think he says whatever he thinks will align with whomever he is talking to. And his ACTIONS with me are the truest of the true.
I've had to remind myself that surely if he still loved me and realized he was an angry person and I didn't deserve any of that...surely he'd be telling me instead of calling a friend to lunch to discuss.
I always, always, always chased him after he stepped over a big boundary. Maybe squeaked an acknowledgement or apology out. And I worked hard for our stability and our relationship. He went along if it was convenient enough and didn't cause him much effort or trouble.
Am I still standing for my marriage?
No. Not this one. The D has already happened. I will agree with STBX on this point, it is just paperwork at this point.
I had a dream the other night where he ripped a gate off the hinges and with superhuman strength (in real life, he used to come close, physique of an NBA star with love handles...I digress), he threw the gate halfway down the street. Many people stood around watching. He broke down crying, and he and sat there in the street holding each other, me comforting him, telling him I would try again some day if he would get his [censored] together. His head, his heart.
I suppose this is where my heart is.
But I woke up and had to remind myself of the colder truth. He set me up, day after day. The gaslighting, increasing emotional blackmail, amid promises of love and growing old together. And the right day came to sabotage and get physically violent. His smiling attitude, "got my money, b$%^&, the joke's on you!"
I am afraid that the H I loved, that I held crying in my dream, is not the one that ever existed in real life. Except as a superficial mask to draw me back to him time and time again after he scared me.
If he ever cared to prove me wrong, with real change and a steady mind and heart, I would try again. I loved him that much.
My way forward
I had lunch the other day with a dear friend of my mothers, who then called her to say, "Z has lost her edge! She's warm, radiant, softer!" Mom says, "so she's not so b%^&*y anymore?" The elderly Southern belle laughed and said she wouldn't have put it that way, but true enough.
The thing is, with abuse of any kind, I believe a person develops a hard shell. In the back of my mind, I was always struggling with some great hurt or irrational happening, the bottoming out of a roller coaster, when I was with other people. I had gotten cynical, negative, aloof, irritable.
That was not the real me. I felt a pang of, my STBX was right! I was a miserable unhappy person! And my mother told me to never believe that nonsense. She was "glad she had her daughter back, she had a hard time reaching her for last few years."
Abuse doesn't just hurt the target.
Vanilla, I have read your posts about your dear, wonderful father and his words to you. More and more your H reminds me of mine, but how wonderful your Pa is still in your life and supportive of you. I know that there is no replacement for that kind of love.
I want to build my life with some stability and this is my focus now.
I will not sit on my hands hoping that H is delaying things because he still loves me. I believe in actions, not words, certainly not words that arrive through 3rd parties.
He was the love of my life, but I am ready to create a new life where that kind of love is no longer good enough or acceptable. If he can measure up with real communication tools and not abuse, he is welcome to walk beside me.
Providing I haven't found someone else to love madly and reasonably.
Mid 30's Psych-abusive M with violent tantrums from XH D 9/15; NC forever on
