Keep Wearing Wedding Band? [Thread #7]

[ForGump]

Gordie-- thanks. Good advice, and I kept thinking about it, although I didn't do a particularly good job of it. I spent much of the day playing w/ my kids, doing housework, and running errands for my family. Late evening I went to the gym and got a brief workout in but I feel the tip of depression above the surface, like an iceberg. I am continually resolving to toughen up, though... It's a marathon, and I'm willing to keep running, but I don't know if I'll stay on the course. I just might run off to somewhere else.

100383-- practically, this means I have 30 days to respond to her divorce petition. We can work out a version that we both agree to, or else I submit what I want, and we're forced to go into mediation provided by the court. The terms of divorce she put into the petition were really half-baked and very unspecific. It's consistent with her inability to really think complex issues/scenarios through. She just has to plunge right into it. The parenting plan assumed we were going to be highly interactive, and simultaneously assumed we would just work out holidays and vacations on the fly. I don't think she understands that I don't want us to parent like we're still married or we're best buddies. I need a clean delineation. The ownership of our house is a little complex, for reasons I don't want to get into here. I will say that odds are fair to good that in the long run it will likely have to be sold.

Maly-- my wife has been fairly consistently cordial toward me, and she does feel a lot of guilt and remorse. But I now believe she now is deep in the throes of MLC, and it's colored and amplified by some degree of borderline personality disorder (BPD). She made a doodle recently that I saw, in which she wrote repeatedly, "Love and passion and meaningful life." A person with BPD has difficulty regulating their impulses, and also experiences sensory perception and emotions with unusual intensity. I believe she's lived all these years with me trying to repress her impulses. Her infatuation with the OM triggered her giving up on trying to control her impulses, and instead embracing whatever her impulses are telling her. And I'm collateral damage, along with my kids.

It's not simple, but that's the gist. A few days ago when I asked her if she's going to have me served, she replied she doesn't know and began crying and wished she could just escape the torment of not knowing what to do. So I know she wasn't sure right up til the end. In fact, she couldn't bear to give me the papers in person. She placed them on my nightstand after I had fallen asleep.

Today I found myself thinking about all the ways that she and I don't get along at times; I found myself thinking about how great it would be to be with someone more emotionally generous. I found wondering what it'd feel like to be loved again for who I am. Then I thought about how difficult that is, to find someone who loves you just the way you are.

In the end, I'm seeing that all my musings and hand wringing about what's DB and not DB doesn't matter all that much. I'm locked into my fate, and all I can do is to put one foot in front of the other. I'm going to give her the signed for acknowledging receipt of the papers, then take my time to formulating a better set of terms for the divorce, then propose to go over it together in person.

It does help that you all are out there in this schizophrenic cyberspace because my in-person friends don't really understand what we're going through. I say schizophrenic because you're there, but then you're not there.