Last night again she was in a furious angry place. I made her help me with the grocery list for our Christmas celebration and loaded her and S7 in the car to go to the store. (She was significantly more cheerful by the time we finished the shopping, and she was a huge help.)
i asked her in the car what would be the worst that could happen if she just tried to tell him how she felt. She said that he would fix himself a cup of coffee and announce that he was going to take a nap. Then she and S7 both said "But that's not what he's really doing!! He's really going in his room to play on his phone!!"
I asked what happens when he finishes in his room and they said they just ask him for the same thing again and he sighs and says "Fine." And they get whatever they want.
Unless I get guidance otherwise, I don't intend to address this with him but it's disheartening. It's going to make it so much harder for me to navigate discipline in their teen years. The only help for it is that Mr. Fantastic almost certainly will reject flat out any effort they make to move in with him if things get too difficult with me. So mostly I'm just venting here because I doubt there's much solution.
I will say that these things make me so grateful for the divorce. I never expected to feel that way but the difficulty of managing his needs and parenting the kids before he left (before the bombs, even) compared to now is very telling. I guess it's the upside of him not seeing them much, though it doesn't often feel like it.
One thing I've learned from New Guy (who may or may not be running for the hills... But that's another story) is that it would be helpful if I could practice being lighter and more playful. I drove past the old house this morning, as I do every day, and I thought about how hard everything was there, and how glad I was to be out of it. And somehow the cost of those two years suddenly just kind of landed on me, and how hard I had to work to build myself out of that, and how grateful I am to be past it all. Part of the cost of that time was my playfulness. Looking back on family pictures, I used to make homemade slime and collect hundreds of snails to keep in an old fish tank and all kinds of goofy things my mother would never have done. I've lost that to a degree. So that's the next thing I'm going to try to rebuild. My kids need a happy, sturdy mom.
New Guy has drawn back and I can't decide if that's a good thing or not. He has been a nice presence in my life, in a lot of ways. Other things about him are less positive, and I'm not sure if they're deal breakers. It may not matter if he doesn't reach back out. It touches me in a sore spot if he doesn't but I'll try to keep track of the positives of the experience if that's how it turns out.
I appreciate this space for journaling. I've strayed away from DBing in what I talk about here but there's nothing to work with with Mr. Fantastic. I'm trying to use what I've learned on the other people in my life -- and it occurs to me it could be useful with New Guy as well. He's been much more helpful with the kids, even never having met them, than their own dad is, and he's fun too. We'll see what happens.
Me42, H40 D12, S8, S7 A revealed: 7/13 Sep 4/14; Agreed to D 1/15
