Newby here . . . (Thread 7)

[JRuss]

FG -- we're pretty much past the negotiations. Custody is agreed to (50/50, 2-2-5-5 initially), as is most of the property chopping. She'll be serving me sometime this week, I think.

She took the kids with her yesterday to meet with a realtor and look at potential houses for her new life. It was hard thinking about that, and I was driving myself crazy ruminating, so I took a 2 hour+ walk and felt a lot better. This is a bad patch with the settlement discussions, meeting with the attorney, getting served soon and her really starting to ramp up her steps to get out (saw on our shared home computer that she's been search Craigslist for washers and dryers and couches, and that was more painful for some reason than I would have thought). It's a done deal, which is heartbreaking, but hopefully we'll go into a bit of a lull soon where we're just waiting for the 90 day mandatory wait time to run, and there's not another major event along the D road right in my face.

The one good thing is that my kids seem to be doing ok with it. S10 was previously showing some issues with rage, but we've both been doing a lot of talking and reassuring him, and he's seemed to calm quite a bit. Obviously going to stay on top of that. D13 has a depressingly large number of friends at school who are in divorced families, and she really doesn't seem to be that stressed out about it. She's not a still-waters-run-deep type of person, so I think we'd all know if she was really struggling, but, again, I'm just trying to watch and observe and keep the lines of communication open.