This morning my W called me at work to tell me the teacher called and our son was throwing up at school. She was home with a car, yet she was so upset she was incapacitated. I told her I was on my way. When I got home she upset, pretty openly, with herself for not just getting in the car and going to pick him up. I told her that I thought she did great in getting through to me. Again I suggested she not be so hard on herself - the end result was that our son was picked up and is fine. I just see her falling apart - she's so down on herself and this can't be helpful to her in any real or healthy way.
Muddle,
You thought she did "great" in getting through to you, and you told her not to be so hard on herself? What did she have to do? Pick up a phone and punch 7 or 11 numbers to call you? Am I missing something here? With all due respect--and I have a tremendous amount for you--your situation is getting nuttier and nuttier by the day.
A sick relationship has a way of perverting a person's sense of what is normal. I am sure that if you print out the excerpt above and re-read it exactly one year from now, you will then be shocked by the things you were willing to put up with now.
You are stuck in a nightmare. You need to wake yourself up.
Whether or not you stay together, your wife is going to continue to drag everybody down until she gets some serious professional help.
One of the weaknesses of DivorceBusting is that, for all its emphasis on keeping a marriage and a family together, it so totally focuses on the couple involved that the kids necessarily get mariginalized in the equation.
For that reason, I think a very helpful exercise in a parent's case may be to go to a quiet space for an hour and drive out all thoughts EXCEPT thoughts about your child.
I think if you do that, you will come away with some very fresh and important perspectives about how this mess is destroying your son and what you need to do to protect him, even if that means doing something counter to your own current desires.
At worst, you've only lost an hour of your time. As it is, I'm sure you spend much more than that each day agonizing over this situation, so I would say you have nothing to lose by trying this, and it just may save your sanity, because it may give you a clearer path and a cleaner purpose.
