Thread #3 - Mediation

[KevinIn]

Journaling:

Haven't posted here in a while, but had something interesting to share with this community. Over the past few months, things haven't really changed between me and my wife. She has a lot of anger towards me, which i still can't fully understand (she cheated on me - i should be the angry one, right?). I may not be perfect, but I haven't done all that much over the past 9 months to make her all that mad, especially considering everything she's done to me that I could have acted much worse about.

So, things are kinda a new normal. Definitely not the normal I wanted at this point in life. But, nonetheless, its at least consistent. And fortunately, both kids (ages 3 and 6) seem to be doing okay and not having any noticeable issues.

Here's where my post gets interesting. My 6 year old recently said that she wanted to talk to her school counselor about "my parent's divorce." I asked if she wanted to talk to me and she said that she really just wanted to talk to the counselor. I said okay and had the teacher arrange it. So, today they talked and the counselor called me after to tell me what they talked about. Nothing surprising really. I ended up calling my wife to tell her about my conversation with the counselor. At one point I said something like "its hard for kids to understand that their parents will never get back together". My wife said "yeah" in what i thought was a slightly sad tone.

Now, i know a principal of divorce busting is to not temperature check or pursue, but i've been separated for 8 months and barely talk to my wife anymore and have no hope or expectations that we will ever get back together (nor do i know if i even want that). But, i was curious if she finally felt like trying to fix our relationship (if you read through all my posts, you'll see that she repeatedly said that she never tried to fix things and didn't even want to try to fix things - this is very hard to hear).

So, I said "Unless you want to try to fix things. Do you?" She replied in what i interpreted as a mean tone "Kevin, NO!". I said okay. It was pretty clear that she still has zero desire to ever work on our relationship. I still find it hard to believe that this woman that I truly loved for so long and that I have two kids with checked out of our relationship a year ago and seems to have zero regrets or remorse about it. Its almost a badge of honor that she won't even accept the idea of working on our relationship.

After we hung up, i texted her that it came across as mean, that i've given up hope but at least wanted to ask if she would work to save a marriage, and that i was sorry that she was so unhappy in our marriage that after 8 months of separation that she still has that response and that i can't imagine the pain she was in while we were married. She texted back that she didn't intend on being mean, and that it wasn't about me, "it was more about feeling bad saying it." I'm not really sure what this means.

So, that's my update. Nothing really exciting. In summary, after not talking about our relationship for many months, I asked if she wanted to try working on things during a conversation about our kid wanting us to not be divorced. She said no to working on things. Her loss.

I will say i've moved on to a descent place mentally. I don't really get sad anymore. But, i still find it perplexing that she was so unhappy in our marriage that she has refused to work on our relationship since the day she said she was unhappy and having an affair. She really was "checked out" when she finally told me. While divorce busting may have helped me get through the tough times, I don't think there was anything i could have done to save our marriage. At least I can have peace of mind that I actively tried to save our marriage and that it really was her decision to walk away.