Muddle's Waters V

[MuddleThrough]

GH, that's exactly where I am. As much as she walks around talking about how her feelings don't matter to me, they have to stop that much more. I'm no longer going to concern myself with how my actions impact her life. I'm going to do for me what I think is right, and that includes being kind and good to her. If she wants to twist not getting what she wants into me hurting her, she can. I'm not going to listen to it any more. She's so angry at me that I do for myself. She's so angry that I want what I have and I set realistic goals for myself and end up getting what I want out of my life. She's angry with herself and her inability to live her life in a way that brings her happiness. I'm not responsible for this - even though this is the biggest reason she doesn't want to be married to me. Well, if I'm not doing a good job at this, why do you continue to rely on me and fault me when you're not happy? Wait - I don't want an answer, because it's none of my business. I still care about her and want to see her succeed and be happy with herself and her life, but she's on a path that will bring her nothing but unhappiness, and I don't really see her motivated to change. I'm not sure I want to have any part in it anymore.

Yes, she screamed (over the phone while I was getting tires put on the car which she later referred to as me "playing" with the car) and actually said something about how I was hurting her because I didn't get the snacks. I basically shut down when she treats me in this way. This is problematic because she escalates when she isn't heard, eventually throwing a tantrum. She never takes responsibility for her feelings or actions. I don't want to play into this game anymore - so I will just let her rant and ignore her. Sounds healthy, right? I can't cater to her and I can't really argue that she's putting her stuff on me when she firmly believes that that's where it belongs.

I just don't understand what she's thinking about when she plans to get divorced. I'm not sure if she thinks that because then she'll need to do everything she'll be able to or if she's grossly miscalculating her life, but she keeps blaming me for not being good enough, etc. She even tells me that I don't do things unless she stops doing them around the house. Well, if you've already done it, it's kind of hard to do it! It's not that she doesn't do anything, it's just that what she does do is done with a huge amount of resentment - and nothing I do is good enough or recognized as being on the same level as the work she does. She's totally in a narcisistic bubble.

I'm tired of the way she treats me too. I liken her behavior of late to someone on a rowboat in the middle of a lake that has decided she doesn't like the design of the boat, there's a problem with it. So rather than row it to shore and put it up in dry-dock and inspect and repair it, she just picks up her trusty sledge-hammer and starts bashing it to bits. The expectation is that if this one's destroyed, she needs another, never mind that she's going to have to swim and she has no idea whether the new one she might get will compare to this one. If it ends up worse, well, this one's done and gone, too bad. I think this is what she's used to in life, being rescued from an endeavor she chose and then regretted because her feelings made it difficult for her to endure it. So if her feelings were bad enough (maybe even name these feelings a disease to validate them) she could get out of it, nevermind that this was something she wanted to begin with. Destroy the current situation with your feelings and then you and everyone in your life who's there to save you is compelled to change the surroundings that are having such a negative impact on your feelings. The unfortunate thing is that she has enough people around her that validate this perspective that she thinks it's normal - so she gets the short term benefit of relief for her ailing feelings, but in the long term her self esteem is shot because she never completes anything. How does this make her feel? So then these feelings have to be blamed on something in the present - so guess what? I'm to blame for making her feel inadequate. I make her feel like a bad parent and like she's not really an adult, etc, etc, etc, never mind that if she had actually put in the work to be all of these things, it wouldn't matter what anyone thought of her, because she'd know she was a great mother and that she was an adult and my (and everyone else's) equal. But if she blames me she might be free of those feelings without expending the effort to work through the painful period of feeling inadequate in the current project. . .

None of this helps me, nor her. I don't know why I try and figure her out anymore. She's not interested in what I have to say. All I can do is look to the part of myself that understands this because it actually is this way itself, and try and grow and better myself because of it.