Heather, your situation was the topic of a very long conversation for the NOPs last night.
I was telling NOP about your airport/vehicle scenario and the first thing out of his mouth was, "Why hasn't she sold the vehicle?"
Well, duh. Makes perfect sense to me.
I read your earliest posts from last year out loud and very long discussion followed and here are some highlights from our conversation. Not in any particular order.
You need a plan. You need a plan so that you are moving forward rather than being in a perpetual reactive mode.
NOP's emphasis was on the need to view your marital issues as *seperate* events. I'll explain as I go.
Sell or trade the van or truck (or whatever it is) immediately. Once the vehicle is sold, apologize to your husband for not realizing how offensive it was, what it represented to him and that you are sorry for what you did in the past and that it won't happen again.
Remove his ammunition by removing the vehicle.
Stop rationalizing your betrayal. In reading your past posts, there was a tendency to say "What I did was wrong, yeah, but hubby was XYZ or doing ABC. Your choice to go outside of your marriage was your choice. Own it. What your husband was doing prior to your indiscretion was wrong, but that stands alone as a *separate* event. He is responsible for it, but his behavior didn't *cause* you to make the choice you did. You need to separate those out as two individual *wrong* things.
Your choice to go outside of your marriage cannot be justified or mitigated by your husband's actions. If any sense of "I did this but it's partly your fault because of the way you were treating me" is leaking out to your husband, he is going to continue to reject it and you.
You don't need to go all mysterious on him, nor does your desire to "get a life" mean that you ought to go where ever you want without him knowing. Continue karate, let him know where you are going, how long you will be there, that you have your cell phone or he can call the Karate center and have you paged. If you are going shopping, do the same. If he doesn't listen, don't get offended, just start putting your schedule on the fridge with corresponding telephone numbers and let him know that the info is on the fridge.
Your husband is an alcoholic. I don't think you need to keep trying to figure out whether or not he is. Anyone that has that much of a relationship with alcohol meets the criteria. You need to join an Alanon group. You need help with this in your marriage. Joining the group is for *you*. Let your husband know when and where. He may find this offensive. You aren't doing this *at* or *against* him.
You can let him know that you are doing this for you. "I have difficulty handling your drinking and want to see what I can do to handle it better." And you really are doing it for you. They will help you get past those questions I saw you repeating as variations of "why does he choose alcohol over me?" You really need this input from folks that are walking similar paths.
Strong gentleness (not grovelling) is required if you choose to enact these plans, not pissiness and not coldness.
Regarding your children. This is another place you're going to have to hitch up your big girl panties. If the kids are with hubby, stop being the shadow parent during that time. Grab a book, sewing, cross stitch puzzle - whatever - and join your family in the same room. Again, you need to integrate into your being, that your betrayal was a separate event *and has nothing to do with your mothering*.
At some point, preferably without the children present, tell him something along the lines of, "I think you are a great dad. Some dads never make time for their kids, but you've always been there for them. I know that I have hurt you with my infidelity, however, I am a good mom. We both want good for our children. Keeping that in mind, I think it is damaging to the children to be placed in a tug-of-war between us. I enjoy spending time with our children just as you do. There will be times when I want to spend quality time with them individually. I will tell you what my plans are and how we can be reached, but I am asking that you not take that as an opportunity to ask the child/children whether or not they would prefer to stay with you. I am concerned that some of these types of actions are or have the potential to alienate the children from me. I am asking that this sort of behavior stop.
If the behavior then continues, I would reiterate your concern about the children being artificially forced to choose between you and I would tell him that "If it continues, I will contact Child Services (a Child Psychologist, an attorney - fill in the blank here with an appropriate professional) and express my concerns in the effort to seek some sort of resolution that will preserve my relationship in a healthy way with our children.
From reading your past posts (just from the first couple of months, didn't have time to go through all of them) - you've been both in the marriage and within days ready to get out of the marriage. Living in that sort of indecisive limbo keeps you unbalanced and unable to be consistant. I suggest that you decide that you are going to work on this for the next year, and that at the end of that year you will take an assessment and see where things are. But for *this* time period, you are in the marriage, period.
NOP pointed out that the ability to forgive varies greatly amongst people. You can read these boards and see people whose spouses left 3 years ago, yet these folks have forgiven them and are actively working at re-establishing the marriage.
Think about Bell Curves in regards to forgiveness. There are folks who can forgive immediately and completely on one end - this is a small percentage on one narrow side of the curve. The vast majority are in the middle - with the ability to forgive with variations of time and effort. Then there there are the folks in the other narrow side who find forgiveness a damn near impossibility.
And it's not because they don't want to. They don't seem to have the innate capability. So, they keep running through the same loop, they know they need to get past it, try and succeed for a time to get past it, and then it rears back up inside and they are back at the starting gate.
Which explains your husbands variations of actions & behaviors toward you over the past two years. People who have a greater capability to forgive can begin to take offense when their spouse doesn't seem to move on. You begin to think they are being purposely cruel and hard. And for some this may be true, but if their nature is to be hard and cruel, this would have shown up prior to the betrayal and would burst out in other areas in the present.
See, you think of it as "a few kisses". Your husband is probably convinced that it didn't stop there. I can tell you that I'm a stranger to you and I have a difficult time believing that it didn't go sexual. Please understand that this is not a judgement against *you* because I would have a hard time believing it of anyone. Here's why. I have run across articles & surveys that contend that the majority of dating adults have sex by the third date. And that's including starting as strangers. You and this OM weren't strangers, you were together at least 5 times by your account, so you can see you're well past the 3X rule. Secondly, people who have marital indiscretions almost always downplay what they did.
So, while you're thinking that your husband is over reacting to a few kisses, I hazard a guess that he is believes it was much more than that. And that is what he is reacting to.
Well, that's a start, but I'll stop before you start to drown...
