Her life is not all rosy and you know that. She hasn't done the work you have.
Yeah for sure. She has her uni program going on and so that's either keeping her distracted enough to not think about all of this. When I think of how she will feel 'loss', I don't see it coming to her until her program is over. Again, just speculating. It may never come.
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From a financial standpoint it sounds like your describing what a stay at home spouse might feel. Does that sound accurate? You and your W made choices together that put you (individually) in a job that might have offered you flexibility but not necessarily the income to match but it worked for your situation. Now that this has happened it has put you in a stressed financial situation? Is that causing some of the anger as reality sets in?
Yeah I think you're right. She was always more ambitious than me and I wasn't sure what my career would look like. One of her early jobs allowed for her to create the career path she's on now - to her absolute credit, she totally engineered this path for herself from this entry level position and had the ambition and vision to do it. It's actually quite an amazing thing what she did for her career.
On my side, I got stuck with crap jobs with no advancement. I was also not as ambitious as her and didn't put as much effort into my career path - which definitely contributed to her losing respect for me. I also went through long bouts of depression which didn't help in the career path situation. But, I took jobs with more flexibility or stayed home for long stretches to take care of the kids so that we wouldn't be paying huge money for daycare and raise kids ourselves. So my flexibility created the space for her to go for more gung ho jobs with longer hours and lots of travel - she knew that I had home life taken care of and she never had to worry about that. I thought that was going to be our trade off. She even told me at one point 2 years ago that she is looking forward to becoming so financially secure and raising her income to a really high level so that I could pursue some of my own interests and work that wouldn't pay much.
I guess I am just coming to the rude awakening that the arrangement we had is completely over and I have to pull up my socks to get financially secure. I know I will figure out a way to increase my earning potential, but I am not sure how right now. I need to think seriously about what type of career I want and what I need to do to make my kids futures secure.
I have become a lot more self-compassionate to myself, which has helped in figuring out my goals and processes to get there.
W definitely wasn't a perfect spouse either and we'll see what the future holds.
