I always love reading your sitch – no one knows how to GAL like you do! I suspect you’re right and will probably find my way over to Surviving. At this point I don’t think that Infidelity is really my problem anymore (if we disregard OW, which I tend to do with someone so pathetic)
Ah Burgbud… coming at me with the insightful and incisive questions.
Why now? Why go dark at all? What is the goal?
A whole bunch of goals – pick the one that you find most valid
1. I need to see if this attachment (call it love if you must) that I feel for H is genuine, or if it is a result of habit and action. I’ve been with him since I was 18 and early on in my sitch embraced the “I love this man and am not going to stop trying” philosophy. And we all know that love is an action (we do all know this, right?) and I have been behaving with love towards him since the beginning. What happens to this love if I detach? We’ve been so bonded in recent months (not bonded enough to prevent him from making plans to shack up with OW, however) that it’s very hard for me to know if I want him back, or if I just like messing with his R with OW (payback, Baby), if his attachment to me is real. I need to step back and figure out what my wants/ needs/ feelings are. We’ve been so deeply into each other’s lives in the year and a half we’ve been separated it clouds my ability to see what my true feelings are. 2. 2. Dating. It hasn’t gone terribly well so far. Oddly enough, getting all dolled up with H in the other room, going out and thinking “Now they’re probably watching Franklin. Now they’re having baths” and wishing I was home with my family has not led to smoking sexy dates. And the uncomfortable moment when the date asks where the kids are: “with their dad… um, at my house… uh, yeah, he’s there waiting for me to get home”. Plus, at some point I’m going to need to have overnighters (1.5 years and counting) and I need to be distanced enough that I stop feeling like it’s infidelity on my part! 3. To see if it will work. The competitive side of me wants to see if I can get him back (and then I’ll figure out if I want him or not) I have done so many things to change our dynamic and heal our fractured relationship. And so much of it has worked to heal us, but not to reconcile us. This is the one thing that is fairly universally recommended and the one thing I could never bring myself to do. I want to look back and see if I’ve truly tried everything. If I don’t try this, I’ll never know whether my walking away would cause him to follow. And if I try this and he doesn’t follow, then I’ll know that he really is not the man for me. 4. To help us both to grow. Like I said (and you know oh-so-well), Rob and I have an overperformer/ underperformer dynamic. This absolutely has to change, and the way we work right now we slip back too easily into our old roles. As long as we keep going like we are now, it will always be me overcompensating with giving too much, and him passively (albeit happily) receiving, while resentment festers about how Anna sets the tone in the relationship. Maybe a significant amount of time will break this cycle and change us enough that we don’t default to our old habits so easily. I feel like if there is a reconciliation to be had, it will never work without a true break where we go off, grow as people and come back together to see what there is left. 5. To help him grow. He went from living with his parents, to living with me, back to living with his parents. He’s always been a very easy person to take care of. I’ve facilitated his relationship with the kids, made sure he eats his veggies, even packed for him to move out. His mother does the same type of stuff for him, as does his sister, and almost every woman he encounters. He inspires caretaking. As soon as I stopped “helping” him with the kids, his relationship with them and confidence in his own parenting blossomed. I need to do this in a lot more areas so that with or without reconciliation, I’m no longer a barrier to him being the kind of man I want as a father for my angelbabies.
Now, obviously I’m not going dark on our coparenting relationship. I’ll still keep him involved and informed, but I won’t send him little emails about the adorable things that D4 did, or S2.5 said. I won’t invite him in for a drink when he drops the kids off – I’ll be upbeat and friendly like I always am, but I won’t seek to engage him. I won’t have our marathon “work avoidance” email sessions where it feels like a real flirtation. I won’t call him when I’m struggling with something around the house.
It’s going to be hard for several reasons… one is that I like doing all that stuff. It’s fun and it feels good. The other is that I think it will hurt his feelings, which I hate to do. He’s said that he feels like I should hate him and there are times that he doesn’t want to reach for me when he really wants to because I won’t want to hear from him, and that he doesn’t deserve to be in the same room as me, let alone have me as a friend. So in his inimitable fashion, this leaves me “in charge” of whether or not we have a friendship. If I don’t initiate friendship, he slinks off saying “I knew you hated me” to which I always say “How could I ever hate you? I care so much about you! I’m so sorry I made you feel sad – let me make it up to you by being extra super-nice!” Cue vomiting. But it’s going to be breaking long-held patterns between us and is going to feel extremely unnatural.
Tonight we are dividing up the possessions that we have remaining. I am getting the vast majority of the house contents (not to mention the house) but I keep telling him he does get to take some stuff. Anyone remember the scene in “The Jerk” (Steve Martin) where he is leaving and crying and saying “I don’t need anyone! All I need is this lamp. This lamp… and this table…” That’s H. I have to practically beg him to take stuff – reminding him that the kids will be with him 2 days a week and he needs to have a nice home for them.
And D4 started junior kindergarten today. It wasn’t actually a very big deal, because she’s not going to a new school but entering the kindergarten program at our daycare. And they let her start going on field trips and spending the day with the “kinders” earlier this month. Technically, I didn’t know she’d had her first day of kindergarten until the end of the day when I arrived and they said “Oh, D4 was with the kinders today”. One day I’ll dress her up, put a lunchbox in her hand and take her picture on the sidewalk. Tell her that was her first day of kindergarten. Not today though, because she dressed herself and went off wearing a Supergirl t-shirt and grey cut-off sweatpants. She looks pretty ratty, but she thought it looked lovely.
