Hey NLW! The best advice I can give you is to not worry about what motivates the WAS to return to the marriage or not. Instead, take your husband out of the equation entirely and focus on being the very best NLW you can be...a woman only a fool would leave. I truly came to a point during my separation where my only goal regarding my husband (soon to be ex at that time) was to co-parent effectively together. In my mind, I was moving on. I honestly cannot say what motivated him to come back; I believe it was a combination of things (he waking up, realizing ow is a complete nut job, seeing me and the kids as the amazing package that we are, etc). Try not to get ahead of yourself and take things one day at a time, one DB step at a time. Right now it's time to focus on YOUR goals!
You are doing great, and you are getting excellent advice from some great DB'ers and vets. Follow what they recommend, and hang in there! ncl
I realise that my thinking is still focused on my H.
I have changed my attitude and focus a lot, I feel. Much more at peace with the idea that he's truly gone and that I need to think only about a life that involves me and the kids.
But part of my sadness at the moment is realising how much of a hole he has dug for himself by taking up with OW semi-publicly again.
I'll get over it, but finding out that he was going away with her for a holiday (my surmise, but pretty sure) has made me realise how difficult it's going to be for him (and me) ever to come back from his current choices. Hence my ruminations on how/if WASs overcome the shame involved.
GAL newsflash - not very exciting/interesting to anyone but me, but I feel as if I've cleared a hurdle in the get-out-and-do-it-alone stakes:
Last night I went to S13's school's quiz night fundraiser for a basketball trip to China.
There were 22 tables of 10 parents and it lasted for 4 hrs - so you can get some idea of the intensity/competition involved.
And my table WON!! Yay! And not only did we win, we creamed the opposition.
I came home with bottles of wine, chocs, etc as my share of the prize.
But most of all, I came home knowing that I could attend such a function - where I had to bowl up to a table of parents I didn't know, and sit with them for 4 hrs, then walk back to my car in the dark at midnight and drive myself home - and not worry about it.
Before all this started, I would NEVER have thought of doing something like this on my own.
I SO wanted to text H to say "Guess what? I just won the school quiz night" because quizzes were always his thing, and we always went to every school quiz night for both of our kids' schools. It would have been happy gloating on my part, not point-scoring - much......
oh my NLW - my memory is so bad - that i didn't realize that i had been following your thread - and had missed your reply to me comletely.
i can't figure out how to get notified about getting messages or answers to my posts.
you were great to have pulled back and not called any of them.
the sister and mother of the ow are friends of ours - we had just never met ow all these years. and in the first few months i was SORELY tempted to call the sister, because H had told me that she was very upset when she realized what they were doing, "because she loves you" he said to me.
but i'm glad i refrained too . one thing this sitch has really taught me - as a life lesson is that EVERYBODY has their own pain, not just me.
and your finding out that compassion and understand help you keep the high road and make you feel better - it really resonates with me, also and that is what i have kept doing.
i was so lucky that in the first week after the bomb, a friend handed me one of Pema Chodron's books - it saved me and took me down the path of meditation, which has given me some semblance of composure for a few minutes here and there .
everything you wrote about how pathetic you felt and how now, just the slightest bit of detachment relieves you so much - it's uncanny - i'm going through the same exact thing - and at the same time. there must be something about the 7 month mark - seems more than coincidental
take care zig
me 46 H 38 M10yrs T 11 S10 BD ow 8/11 h filed 9/25/12
"if i could define enlightenment briefly, i would say it is the quiet acceptance of what is"
""I'll get over it, but finding out that he was going away with her for a holiday (my surmise, but pretty sure) has made me realise how difficult it's going to be for him (and me) ever to come back from his current choices. Hence my ruminations on how/if WASs overcome the shame involved.""
i know how you feel and i wonder exactly the same thing you do. i wonder though, that whether the LBS sees and feels the shame of it so much more intensely for the WAS , because we have known them as the good people they are before they did this. and then if i keep in mind that H literally almost doesn't know what he's doing, it's easier to understand how they can get over it if they want to. ( i mean i know he is conscious of what he's doing, but he's built his anger up to such a ferocious level that it blinds him in a way to the reality of what he's doing and how it is affecting the people in his family)
a few days ago as a GAL i went out with the girls to celebrate our friends b'day and at the first restaurant we were at, it suddenly hit me that he had been in there with ow, and then we walked by 2 others that he had taken her to also, and i had to just let it go and say you can't let this matter, because these are great places to go out to and there will be tons of other times when you will meet your friends there and you can't not go because they've been there together.
if we ever expect them to let go of ow and work it out with us, we will have to let go of these sorts of things, right? so might as well let go of them now.
me 46 H 38 M10yrs T 11 S10 BD ow 8/11 h filed 9/25/12
"if i could define enlightenment briefly, i would say it is the quiet acceptance of what is"
I've received a lot of recommendations to let my H go - live my life as if he is no longer a part of it.
And I'm trying to do this as much as I can.
But I also think that in my sitch - 2 kids: D16, S13 - there is going to be a lot of contact.
H is back from his trip tomorrow after being away for 5 days and I think he'll ask again if he can take kids to school in the mornings and drop them home after school each day.
For a while, I've been resisting his requests to take them to school - because he is not very reliable, time-wise, and having him standing awkwardly around the house each morning was pretty stressful for us all.
I also worried that he was only wanting to drive them around to justify his recent bullying of me about his taking of our family car.
That, and I suspect his L has also told him to do more in respect of child-caring duties if he wants to get his hands on a big chunk of my superannuation.
So my question is:
Should I agree to him coming over each morning and afternoon to pick up and drop off the kids (keeping up the regular contact / making him see what he's missing in family life)
OR
Would it be better from a drop-the-rope/get-a-taste-of-the-reality-of-life-on-your-own perspective to say:
"We've got our own routines now, thanks. We need to do these things on our own" (Ie, Now that you've left us)?
So, might it be better to increase the contact OR give him a chance to miss us?
Forgot to add that a part of me thinks it would be good to annoy OW by having H come over to our house before 7am each day, and also each afternoon.
Can't be conducive to the building of a happy, stable relationship.
However, given that he doesn't stay very long even when he does the pick-up and drop-off ( i.e. he disappears for the 25-min gap between delivering D16 to her school and coming back to get S13 to take him to his school. I think he goes back to OW's house in between).
And before anyone tells me to "just do whatever is best for me"....
I have to say that I've thought about this, and I just don't know any more. I want to do what's going to be best for getting my M back on track.
