Hey doodler! Walmart doesn't sell beer here so I think I'll be able to avoid going there. At my time of life an orgy would probably do me in and since I'm of Scots heritage - "not" fighting and drinking would probably be too much of a shock to my system ....
Actually I'm going to pick up a case of beer on the way - then stop at home for my blood pressure meds (the drugs part?). Planning on a quiet time with a good book, my 1 month old nephew, my (much) younger brother and his wife and trying to let the stress ebb away.
Feels weird going for a "sleep-over" at 52. This is the first overnight non-business trip I've done without W in 28 years.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
Cadet - I appreciate your concern. My doctor has never been too happy about that either. I'm not planning a bender and one thing that I am extremely careful of is to always take my meds as prescribed.
Pre BD I was drinking a bit over 24 beer / week for the last 20 years - mostly on the weekends which I'm sure is a lot of my own part in creating a WAW. In my rural area this isn't considered unusual. Oddly a lot of W's friends, especially those she made on her wayward journey are a "lot" worse and I believe her starting to drink excessively herself with them contributed to her waywardness.
Post BD it's usually 2 or 3 / week - occasionally a couple more. I've been on blood pressure meds for about 10 years now. A big part of my GAL plan was to haul my fat drunk @ss out of my chair and DO things. My @ss is much slimmer because of this and because doodler still hasn't FedEx'd me those cookies he keeps talking about. I'm also down one of the pills and probably will be dropping off one more soon as my BP is consistently in the "good range" these days if not a bit low.
W herself has realized that excess drinking caused her to do a number of things that she now regrets and is consciously working on avoiding that with some reasonable success.
One of my longer term goals is to be off ALL the pills except vitamins and perhaps a daily aspirin.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
Man, doodler - how come you never offered to overnight me cookies?
AndrewP - Congrats on starting to get off of some of your meds. That's great progress, and hopefully you feel better physically as a result. Keep up the activity and have a great weekend!
_____________________ Me:44 W:44 Together 22 Married 21 S 19 D 17, 15, 15. 7 EA/PA suspected 3/30/2016 EA/PA confirmed 4/5/2016 ILYBINILWY 4/5/2016 WW asked for Divorce 5/8/2016 (WW has backtracked)
Friday night I passed through the house to put together a bag for the weekend and W wasn't there (no big surprise). Oddly she had taken her annoying little dog with her too along with food for him - an extended stay of her own perhaps? But the yard light was on which is usually only when she expects to be back that evening. I sent her a text to confirm that she had the dog (she's forgotten him outside before) and got an immediate response that she had the dog and an apology for not leaving a note. I gave a one word reply - not making any effort to find out where she was or with who which is actually pretty usual for me especially since BD.
I spent Friday night with my youngest brother and his wife and their baby. MUCH talking and visiting was done. Excess beer was drunk (sorry Cadet) but no drunk texting or messaging.
Late Saturday morning I got up and saw an unnecessary text from earlier from W asking about groceries. I responded briefly apologizing for the delay (claimed I was walking). I spent Saturday walking (did 13 1/2 km and visited my grandparent's graves), thinking, reading and basically just relaxing. Very little beer was drunk. Even though I was homesick and missing W I stayed there and didn't reach out to her and also stayed off social media except for one selfie that my SIL suggested which many friends liked but W did not. It also turned out that my other SIL who wasn't there had reached out to W to invite her to a future family event.
Sunday morning I was "really" wanting to go home but instead headed in the opposite direction and visited with my oldest brother and his wife for the morning. Again much talking was done although that brother is so angry about what is going on that he made an excuse to leave so that he wouldn't have to hear it. He's hugely supportive and has expressed to his W how much he appreciates her taking the lead in active support.
I got home about 2:30 in the afternoon and after a brief "hello" to W who was actually home got into my household chores that needed to be done.
W seemed very nervous when I got home. I was cheerful and worked on looking happy to see her but gave few details of my visit. She in turn said little of what she had done for the weekend. She was working on purging even more of the junk that has accumulated around the house which has been a long-term goal of her's that she will occasionally work at since BD. It looked like she'd spent much of the weekend on it.
An important (I think) thing that she made a point of telling me was that she had gone into our books and reconciled her personal bank account. She had blocked my access to that shortly after BD and had never updated our book-keeping software with any transactions. I pretended to not care - she seemed disappointed. To my surprise when I checked there was "nothing" odd in it. I had figured she'd been paying L bills, costs of going to see OM and who knows what out of it in preparation for leaving. Because I still can't see the account I don't know if she did it honestly, but I think I can assume that. This means to me that as I thought, she's taken practically NO steps towards the exit despite her prior constant talk of it. She also nervously asked about a couple of deposits from a couple of weeks ago to our joint savings account which I easily explained as something we had talked about but that I hadn't gotten into our software yet. I also showed her the credit card bill which had arrived in my email on the weekend. Historically we would make sure both of us see all bills as part of keeping our finances in order.
W also apologized for not changing the sheets in the MBR. This is something she never did even before BD - and why would she want to change a bed she doesn't use - I checked - it didn't get used in my absence.
W made us a fairly nice dinner (it's often been me lately and often alone) and was about to do the dishes (becoming a domestic diva again?) but I pointed out that I needed to make my lunch and would take care of the dishes so she buggered off to another part of the house.
W made a point over dinner of mentioning her web chat with SIL2 and that she'd seen the selfie. She seemed very positive about the message from SIL2. Both SIL are positive that in my absence that W would have been stalking me and snooping around the house - perhaps finding the D papers that I have pre-done along with the MC information I have in the same file. I haven't shown any of this to W because I am waiting for her to be ready for R talk and while it's not obviously laying out it would be easy enough to find.
Through the afternoon and evening W unusually had no regular texts coming in and wasn't sending any. However when we went to bed her phone went nuts while I was sending my own note to my co-conspirator SILs. It made me giggle how we were acting like teenagers.
So - my brothers and their wives are in full support of me except that my youngest brother is horrified by the thought of me dating his MIL which became a bit of a running joke. My SIL will be reaching out to W cautiously to bring her into the family fold on my side. Even though W quite likes the younger SIL she's never historically been close to members of my family for lots of ancient history reasons and perhaps it was part of her control over me to keep away from them. W has conflicting emotions about our baby nephew. She loves babies and "really" wants to spend time with him. From comments she's made she thinks that she would be excluded which especially now is not the case.
While this 180 was hard to do I think it turned out well. I have massive support from my family which I hadn't reached out for earlier because I was protecting W and her "secret" A. They will forgive her if she comes back and are working on reaching out to her while keeping knowledge of the A secret. W I think also got a good taste of fear of what I might do and a taste of what it would be like with me gone. I then showed that I am still being open, honest and showing her trust even if the reality might be slightly off of that.
One big frustration for me is that this has been a VERY slow grind - or so it seems. I have keep reminding myself by looking at the calendar how short the timelines actually are. I also have no clue how the path will change from this slow growing together which feels like room-mates more than being a couple together. Does there need to be some sort of "jump-condition" to go from two people who can live together in the same house to the loving couple we used to be and I believe we could be again? I keep wanting to find that magic switch that turned off abruptly on BD for her. Does it even exist as something that could flip the other way?
I still don't even know if she "wants" to stay. The lack of active leaving even during the height of the A confuses the heck out of me. I expect that her friends and family who've been enabling her for much of the last year are as confused as I am. My hope is that her visit with her brother the prior weekend (after which she was quite depressed) plus my going away will get her to think harder about what it is that she really wants.
In the mean-time as my SIL have requested and I agreed to, I will continue to be patient and not press her. The almost daily improvements in our relationship help a lot but man-o-man do I ever just want this to be over.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
There is a lot there Andrew but one question... Why apologize and give a fake excuse for the delayed response on the txt message?? I would have just responded to whatever she was asking hours later.
pinn - I know that it's not "good" DBing but one thing that W always liked about me and that I like about myself is that I am reliable. Responding did run counter to the plan of going dark for the weekend but I did at least not initiate any contact.
P.S. - sorry about the novel - once I start writing it's hard to stop especially since this is one of my few outlets and I've always had a tendency to journal.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
The fake excuse was because I was embarrassed to be hung over. (I wish we had an edit button here).
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
I think I need to practice even more extreme patience. It's frustrating to me but W is overwhelmed with work issues and (I presume) stress about us plus who knows what else. Maybe even guilt from her A - I can hope on that one. Not necessarily to be mean but because it might mean that she would be willing to make amends.
She has always had a tough time making decisions and following through on them. Deciding on whether to reconcile or not is probably the biggest decision of her life - even bigger than deciding to marry me all of those years ago. I think putting pressure on her is probably the absolute wrong thing to do right now even though the uncertainty eats at me. Everyone who knows us both is positive that we will reconcile in time.
Is dealing with a WW very different than a WAW? I'm presuming that since (I believe) that the A is over and she's now had a bit of time to recover from that that I should be treating her as a WAW? I've been reliable, considerate and letting her know that I care for her in as non-pursuing way as possible. I've also been making it obvious that I'm living my own life and taking control of what needs to be done. Today for example instead of what I would have done a year ago and asking what "she" was making for dinner tonight and if I could assist (she always insisted on traditional roles) I asked her if she would be joining "me" and that I was trying to decide what to make for myself.
I feel pretty confident in my GAL these days thanks in no small part to the support from friends, family and here. I just wish that I could take her in my arms and make it all go away. She is hurting so bad right now.
On this forum, when it happens, I've mostly seen here the dramatic sudden reconciliation. Is this seemingly long slow slog also a valid path? It's realistically only been about 6 weeks since the end of the A and only 3 weeks since I asked her to consider reconciliation.
On BD H52, W50 T27, M26 S21, D23 BD-9-Mar-16 D-15-Jan-18 Final-19-Apr-18 I am a storyteller. The story may do you no good. But a story is never for the listener. It is always for the one who tells
Hi Andrew... A few quick thoughts.... You hupothize too much. Stop believing, guessing, mind reading etc. you seem hung up on WW vs WAW. Your case is WW... They don't switch back and forth.
I would stop focusing on what you think is going on or trying to understand things and focus on making yourself a better man.
I am working on a long, slow path... Been over a year and making progress.
