Thank you, Bttrfly, El and DnJ for your encouraging words. It means so much to me that I can always come here to express my words and feelings.
I have just spent a lovely week with my 3 children and another niece and nephew who also came along on a mid-week holiday.
As I already sensed, EXH and OW2 are indeed back together and she will soon be moving to her homeland, which is actually very close to our country. Through SIL I found out that it is the intention that they will commute between the 2 countries. No idea why, his kids don't want to see him anymore, so he might as well go live in her homeland. He has no business here anymore.
NC really seems to be the solution for me today. It has given me an enormous amount of time to think about the past and the future.
EXH does not follow the NC rule. He accuses me of taking the children away from him, now threatens to review the entire divorce and child support, says he will take a lawyer, etc.
He now feels that he has really lost everything and wants to manipulate me emotionally, but I won't allow it anymore.
I have given one more response, something specific about the children, but otherwise I don’t react anymore. And now I really realize I'm doing the right thing.
Kml regularly talks about the rose-colored glasses, well, I’m taking them off, although very slow but steady. Don't get me wrong, my relationship with EXH was real and intensely beautiful for about 16 years, but now that I have started to talk more with his brother and he has told me a lot about the past (before my time with EXH), it is clear to me that he has become exactly the same person he was in his youth again.
I've also given him the safe-conduct "too" long in recent years and used his MLC illness as an excuse to let me be treated as his back-up plan and I will never, ever allow this again.
Yes, MLC really exists, but just like all personality disorders, crisis situations etc. we cannot help them, as long as the person in question does not want to be helped. Letting go is the only option.
Stella's story, and the advice you give her, makes me relive everything from the very beginning, but now I'm obviously much stronger, and I can look at it rationally, which is huge progress.
Now it feels good to let him go completely, I won't be his safety net anymore. I've done this several times over the past 3 years but now he's on his own.
I now choose resolutely for my own happiness and that of my children, because they too have been the victims for 3 years now of a Father who has let them go through an emotional hell, and a mom who has perhaps approved his behavior for too long, simply because he is not “himself”.
I'm more and more convinced that he might just want to be this person from his youth again, and that's a person I'd rather have nothing to do with.
It won’t always be easy but I want a future again and to have a future I know this is the only way to move forward.
