Yes I can see truth in all of that, but I'm not quite prepared to go dark yet. I might be ready after his trip away and then my trip to Europe because we will have time apart anyway then, I'll see how it goes.
It wasn't really a boundary I suppose, though I did text him first and say 'we need to talk before I agree to meet tomorrow' and he rang me straight up. So if he had disagreed with me or been rude then I would have said I wasn't meeting him. Then at the end of the conversation he said 'well tomorrow is Friday and I'm usually pretty grumpy at the end of the week but we're doing something fun and then going for pizza so that ought to be quite relaxing'. So that might be as close as I get to him saying 'I understand, I agree, and I will do my best'. I'm ok with that for now, though I will be alert for any future bad behaviour like on Saturday and will not be tolerating it in any form. He did something similar a few months back when I met him and was running late due to public transport, and he told me he was grumpy because he had been waiting round in the cold but it wasn't my fault. I can handle someone being grumpy and telling me why, I can't handle being unjustly blamed for it and used as a human punchbag.
In a way his limiting how much he sees me and the kids feels like it is trying to protect us from this negative treatment of us in the past. I'm not sure how much it moves anything forward, but I feel like he's suffering from extreme burnout in his job, an MLC and an alcohol issues. At some stage he might break, but I don't know when that will happen or how it will happen. I don't really want to be in the middle of that if it does happen, I can't fix him and this is something he needs to work through himself. I feel a bit like him moving out was him trying to postpone his breaking, but I suspect it hasn't miraculously solved his problems as he might have thought it would. If he takes too long in this breaking then he'll find there is no dilly and no kids waiting for him.
