Stella… If your H wants to be helpful with the house and you need his help, no harm in letting him do that. However, do not read anything into it. My H was also helpful in the beginning. Ironic as he rarely helped me with things when we were married. I thought, at the time, that it might mean something but really, I think it was guilt. Despite all of his rewriting of history in order to justify his behaviour, he knew, deep down, that I did not deserve to be treated the way he treated me and that he was a giant-sized a$$ for abandoning me the way he did. He was really just making himself feel better. My feelings were as inconsequential to him post break-up as they were pre-break-up. So please be careful.
Also…if he does decide at some point that he wants to come back, do NOT allow him to do so without him doing some serious work first. If you read my thread, you will see that I had had a BD in 2014. Like your H, he had completely rewritten history so that when we did visit a counsellor, I could not believe the things he was saying. It was so far from reality that I literally thought he had lost his mind. To hear him tell it, you would think that we hadn’t had one happy moment since the birth of our children. It was truly bizarre.
Anyway, what followed was basically a five-month IHS with him going to counselling and joining a men’s group where they literally howled at the moon(not officially but that’s what it amounted to) and one month where he was living in a friend’s garage suite (he said). At the end of six months, he came home, declared he was “in love with [me] again” and wanted to recommit to me and to our children. I was so grateful for his return, I just let him walk back in with no questions asked. And when I did bring it up with a question like, “Hey…what the heck was going through your mind for those six months? Can we talk about it?”, he would decline the invitation saying it was embarrassing to talk about and that it felt like his brain was in a fog and he didn’t know what he was thinking. A month and a half later, his health issues started and four years of unbelievable lies and behaviour followed until the second BD in 2018.
So be careful my friend. As others have said on here, believe nothing that he says and only half of what he does. Keep focusing on you and building a great future for yourself regardless of what he is doing. If he has a place in it, that will be up to you. You may just find that eventually you won’t want him to. Don’t be afraid of that, btw. It’s very freeing when you start to live your life and make decisions based on your own needs and you don’t feel compelled to consider his. (((HUGS)))
