Did Not See It

[RDS]

Since I had lunch with my wife Tuesday I’ve had 2 telephone conversations with her. One was for about 30 minutes. She initiated it as she was verifying I had enough money in our joint account to withdraw $200. We talked about mundane things and it was a generally good call.

The call yesterday, however; was over 3 hours long and there was a lot of crying (mostly by me), lots of laughter, soul searching, and dirty laundry exposed. She exposed all the dirty laundry towards me, which was fine because I needed to hear her side. I did not want to throw blame at her because I wanted her to open up to me and let me know what was in her heart.

The call was initiated by me because I got a forwarded email my L sent me that was from my W’s L. It was outlining what my W wanted as temporary support. My W wants me to give her half of my military retirement and then pay for everything else. She also wants us to sell the house ASAP. I called her and told her there is no way I can give her half my military retirement and continue to pay for everything else. She responded by telling me she is entitled to half and asked if I didn’t think she deserved it. I told her she was entitled to half but only after a divorce and not during a separation. In SC there is no such thing as a legal separation. You’re either married or you’re divorced. There is no in-between.

She told me she has no money left over to barely eat. I told her I understand she doesn’t have money but there was nothing stopping her from getting a full time job or an additional part time job to help pay her bills. Me explaining she wasn’t fully entitled to get my military retirement and letting her know there was nothing stopping her from getting another job was the only time in the 3 hours I remotely went accusatory towards her. I did not want her to go into her shell and clam up.

Her heart towards me is on life-support is the best way I can describe her feelings towards me. She told me she lost hope long ago and she said she was an enabler by allowing me to continually emotionally abuse her over the years. She was going back to when I was still in the Air Force and recalling all these instances where I yelled and screamed at her for no apparent reason. I honestly could not remember any of these things. I have a strong suspicion that she took a lot of those instances and was taking it out of context. I don’t know. My D got pissed when I told her of some of things my W mentioned. My D said my W has NEVER taken responsibility for when things go wrong. My D said whenever my W lost a friend, a job, or whatever; it was always someone else’s fault. I never noticed that. My D knows she is exaggerating everything. I guess believe none of what she says and half of what she does comes into play here, but I know a lot of what she says I did is true because I’m the one who did it.

When she told me how she felt after what I did to her was devastating to me. I felt so bad. A couple of weeks ago I did the role reversal with my DB coach and it was revealing to me just how cruel I was to her. My DB coach had me write an apology letter last week. I read the apology letter to my coach and she said it was very well written (don’t judge my writing skills from these posts!) and the coach suggested only minor changes. I was to send the letter to my W next week sometime since we just had lunch a couple of days ago. I felt it was pointless to wait since I had done a lot of apologizing, giving empathy, and validating already so I sent it to her through email late last night.

My W texted me to say she had talked to her L and said she was going to get a court date to discuss temporary support. At the end of the text she thanked me for the letter. She said it was very nice and she knew it came from my heart (which it did).

Just a few months ago in April I mostly only knew one emotion and it was usually resentment with brief periods of happiness. Now I go through all of them in minutes. It’s emotionally draining.

To save my M it’s going to take a very long time and a lot of work. Sometimes I have to look in the mirror and see if I still want to do this. It would be so much easier to throw in the towel and avoid the hard work to get this done, and even after all that it still might not come to fruition. **sigh**.