And we keep moving on.

[Gerda]

WOW, Irish. That is astonishing. It's like you lifted it all out of a really well-written novel about a crazy family. (Hers, not yours).

And it is so true. I knew my MIL for 20 years. She even told me at the start of MLC that if H was cheating, well, his father had always said he was rotten to the core, and then I'd know he wasn't worth waiting for.

Six years later, she won't speak to me and hasn't seen or really talked to my son, her favorite person in the world who she really helped raise the first few years.

This dialogue is an amazing portrait of how people who don't have ears to hear can't hear. Everything you say is so clear, so simple, so obviously true. Yet each response is more absurdly unhearing than the next, from both the sister and XW. If I wasn't a survivor of the same thing, I would think you must be leaving something out!

I'm not sure they'll ever see the truth or see even a fraction of what a great man and father you are.

Learning to accept that I couldn't justify myself and shouldn't try was a big hurdle for me. I think it helped me in other parts of my life though, as realizing it made me realize that I have always been tortured by the need to be understood, to explain myself, to be the good one. With these people, even when you are, you aren't. So it's humbling. And I guess humbling is good.