First on her forming bounds at work. You are right, nothing you can do about that except try to get her to quit and put her in a bottle. (Sarcasm.) It doesn't matter what field she works in, there will be opportunities to meet OM. The thing that keeps a spouse from having an A is their own morals and ethics. If she has already shown this penchant then it may be a common struggle for her, and by extension, for you.
After BD there is no such thing as giving too much space. Read the pursuer-distancer dynamic. No about of distancing will cause her to NOT pursue if she changes her mind and decides to pursue. In fact, the more distance you put between the two of you the more likely (though don't get excited because it isn't a guarantee) she will be to pursue. Bunches, I continue to see a resistance in you to DB. You have to embrace the counter-intuitive nature of DBing in order to do it successful. Your intuition is your enemy.
Which leads me to marriage counseling. MC has ZERO chance of working with a spouse that is walking away. First, you setting it up breaks one of the first principles of DB: do not pressure or pursue! And I don't care what she said. Her words have little to no meaning. Especially since she said that to you pre-BD. After BD nothing the WAS said before hand matters. Even if they told you that they love you every single day leading up to BD, once BD hits that is not how they feel. This is why taking a WAS words, either before BD or after, is a fool's game. Any words before BD are meaningless because everything has change. Any words after BD are meaningless because a WAS will say whatever they feel fits their need at any given moment. So bottom line, you cannot believe a word she says, or has said.
And you are using your kids as an excuse for becoming super Husband. No one is saying that you shouldn't do your part. We are saying that you should only do your part. She is firing you as a husband, that doesn't mean try even harder to be her husband. It means give her what she wants and let her see what that means. Do you and your kids laundry. Let her do her own. Make sure you and the kids are fed, clean and in a safe, clean environment. Let her fend for herself on that front (IE do not pick up after her unless it is posing a danger to your kids).
Finally, your excuses in regard to your son rub me the wrong way. Completely. I will try to soften this but it fits your pattern of doing what you want to do and then excusing it later. I have one child. My daughter. She is in college now. It would require a prison cell, or walls reaching to the heavens, or a military army to prevent me from being a big part of my daughters. 3 hours. Autism. House fires. None of that would keep me from being a father to my child.
Bunches, my advice is simple. GET INTO IC. Use the time and money you were going to spend on MC, and get into IC. Find one that is pro-marriage, but that also is willing to tell you the hard, fast truth on where you need to improve as a person and as a husband. Bunches, last time you disappeared, got D'd, appears you didn't continue to work on yourself, and a few years later you are in a similar spot. If you do not take this as an opportunity to work on yourself you will continue to repeat this pattern. You called it "feels like failure again". Divorce is only a failure if you do not use it to learn from and improve yourself.
M(53), W(54),D(19) M-23, T-25 Bomb Drop - Dec.23, 2017 Ring and Piecing since March 2018
