The major difficulty in this whole process is my W playing the victim role. She talks a lot about being scared and frightened of me. She gets upset if I stand up for myself calmly. I have worries about how D will go, as I assume we are heading down that path at this point.
It's almost as if she assumes I am high-conflict by nature, so she is on guard and protective and feels like she has the right to do whatever she wants. My opinion is that she is high-conflict by nature, so I am on guard by making sure I don't poke the sleeping bear. What has happened is I have given way and tried to minimize the conflict. The fact is, I have to face the conflict, but given my W's intense fears and insecurities I want to be careful about it. She has thrown around words like "abuse" and "PTSD" often in MC, and frankly I worry she will do the same thing in a divorce proceeding. I am not worried about defending myself, as I believe I have nothing to worry about, but I am not looking forward to the process.
As a simple example, a few weeks ago she asked for an extra weekend night for the kids because her friend was visiting. This was one of my weekends. I gave it to her. Then she asked to do something to extend her extra day until the evening. I said "no"... that's it. Calmly. She got angry and emotional about it, and even brought it up in MC as feeling like I am not being amicable.
The whole thing is disappointing. Because of her intensity, we have minimized conversations and, as a result, we are not even co-parenting effectively (in my mind). It would be nice to talk every 2-3 days just to make sure we know what's going on with the kids, for instance.
The only thing that is working for me right now is having space and time to work on myself. Everything else about this separation is not working particularly well - the kid timeshare, the finances, the threatening overtones when my W talks about her fear, the inability for my W to understand I am trying to work together on fair compromises with her - it's really getting me down.
