Newby here . . . (Thread 7)

[JRuss]

So W picked this AM, right before the kids needed to get up and start getting ready for school, to fire up the "we need to move this D forward and get it done" conversation. I had known this was coming, had steeled myself to be calm and collected when it came, but I ended up being really put off balance given the timing. I was just enjoying a cup of coffee before the big Friday AM push to get the kiddos to their respective schools. So I reacted poorly, and we got into it, cut the fight off to get the school drop-offs done, then reconvened back at the (now empty) house to continue where we left off. It was a long, painful walk back through all of how we got here (always amazed at how wide the gulf is in terms of how we each see our sitch, why our M is dead, etc.), but it eventually swung around to pretty dispassionate negotiations on how we're going to go about dismantling our life together and divvying things up. We both missed the entire morning at our respective jobs, but we did pretty good I think to essentially have an agreement completely banged out before lunch.

She'll be filing in two weeks or so, and we'll be divorced in late April/early May. 50/50 custody, which was my one real boundary I would have gone to the mattresses over, but she is fine with that and has no interest in fighting that.

I tell you -- you can think you're prepared, you can practice how you think it might feel, but you just can't ever be fully emotionally "ready" to have that conversation where you negotiate like business people how 20 years together will get taken down and chopped up. It is brutal. It is dehumanizing. It is the opposite of love and hope and joy. I want to crawl into a hole, cover myself up and just check out for a really, really long time. I feel more tired than I've ever felt in my life.