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[may22]

Sage,

So glad you stayed strong on this one. It is NOT YOUR JOB to make your H feel better. Your job is to take care of you and your beautiful children. You can be the best mom you can be when you are safe and whole and healthy.

I'm going to say the thing I hate when people say, which is that he fired you as his wife. Ugh, I hate it when people say that. But honestly... why, why, why do you care if he is devastated? Honestly, so what? He has betrayed you and lied to you and left you. He went on a trip to see the OW and didn't answer his phone when you were trying to let him know that your child ran away. Letting go of caring about him is not petty or punishing or any of the rest. Your energy needs to be focused on you, and right now, you know for yourself that making this easier on him means twisting yourself into a pretzel and shoving down your own needs in favor of his.

What can you do to let go of your need to cushion his landing? You have to spend whatever emotional bandwidth you have at the moment on YOU, so that you can be there for your kids. THAT is your number one job.

At some point there was some conversation on my thread about me preventing my H from feeling the consequences of his own choices and therefore preventing him from the growth and work he needed to do for himself, which was, in the long run, the wrong thing to do, even if it felt easier in the moment. I think this might be applicable to you. I know it feels so uncomfortable to let him be in pain. Can you think of him like a child? That by making this all easy on him you're helicopter parenting and not letting him make his own choices and experience the natural consequences of them, and have the opportunity to experience growth and learning from those?

In the sense of standing for your M, the only way back for him, if he does come back (which somehow I think he will, please no-one ding me for saying this but I've always felt this about Sage's H) is if he goes through the process of truly understanding and accepting the consequences of the decisions he has made, and if it turns out that those aren't things he can live with, doing the hard work of personal growth and change to become the kind of H that you deserve. I think of this like that children's song about going on a bear hunt... can't go over it... can't go under it... can't go around it... have to go THROUGH it. He has to go through this in order to come out on the other side someone capable of a true partnership with you.

And in the sense of having a mutually respecting co-parenting relationship or even friendship with him eventually, this HAS to be a two-way street. It doesn't work for it to be you bending over backwards so that he can do the bare minimum and reap the benefits and accolades of a perfect D. This feels like you just extending the same dysfunctional dynamic of your M into a post-M world.

You don't have to be cold or mean. You also don't owe him any explanations. If you need fuel when you start to let that gigantic heart of yours get the better of you, think of him snooping in your house and reading your journals and then using your high school words against you. Think of him ignoring your phone calls on his trip. Think of him making dumb cracks about women to your family. Think of your dad telling you this isn't your circus. And then think of the whole and healed feeling inside yourself that you're nurturing and protect that little seed like it is your fifth child.

((SAGE)) xoxoxoxo you can do this.