Muddle's Waters V

[MuddleThrough]

You know, this is one area where I'm a bit annoyed at W. She chooses not to do something and then complains that she can't do it or doesn't have the ability to - or rather that I'm preventing her from doing so. She doesn't stand up and do what she wants to and it's always someone else's fault. It's like this enabling thing she keeps saying. She blames her dependancy on me, tells me that I'm enjoying it, that I like it. Never once does she stop and say "If he's only enabling me, that must mean that I'm the one responsible for the choice to do it." And the funny thing is that I'm not responsible for the immediate benefits of the initial choice, just the consequences of it that come later down the road. Case in point, she chose to stay home with S4 - I agreed with her choice as we both thought is best for him, and it worked out for her too. Now, she has isolated herself from the world and this is my fault because I enabled her choice to do so. I would also enable her NOT doing so if SHE chose to do good things for herself. I don't call this enabling, rather I call it support. I respect her decision as my equal and support it. This whole "enabling" thing takes equality out of the equation, because it implies that I know better than she does. Maybe now I do - but then the question of whether I want to be with someone that chooses to remain in a lower position than me in terms of her self-realization goes comes up.

For almost 10 months now she has been talking about leaving me. Where's the action? She hasn't even applied for a job. Yet she'll turn around and blame me for this. In fact, we were talking about this with her mother and my W said that she doesn't want to stop caring for S4 at home. Yet she wants out of this terribly miserable marriage that is making her feel so bad? I don't see any desire to do so, at least there's no action on her part. She'll likely stay in this state forever if I don't do something about it. I was thinking of giving her an ultimatum because our separation is contingent on her acheiving her goals of getting a job, learning to drive the car, etc., telling her that if she's not ready to leave by the beginning of the year, I'm going to move and she's going to be stuck living with her mother, whether they like this arrangement or not.