Just Tired

[RDS]

Costco is an amazing place, but I never associated it with getting the W in the mood.

[TiredTN]

So it's been another week and the tempers have still been kept in check for the most part. I don't think either one of us have said, "I love you" for the better part of a month...six weeks, or maybe more, but we are have been able to tolerate and communicate fairly well. For the time being I'll take that. No more touchy feely action in the last week, but that's to be expected. You can't go from 8-10 times a year to 2x a week overnight...well you can, but I don't expect it.

There's not really anything dramatic to report.

[TiredTN]

Ahhh...so the few weeks of relative calm have passed. I was out of town last night when I get this text from my wife, "Your stupid fat talk is paying off. Andrew is pitching a fit about eating at Moe's tonight!!!!! He and she does NOT need to be up till 930 10pm at night!"

Okay, so that was just a text, not the end of the world, but what is this about?

I get home late and everyone is in bed so this morning we are getting ready for school and I have a few minutes alone with Andrew and he tell me he just didn't want to eat his cookie at Moes because he had a sugary dessert the night before at church dinner. After dropping the kids off at school I come back home to ask the wife about it and she just starts going off again about "fat talk."

Putting it all together it seems Andrew didn't want the cookie, my wife wanted him to get it anyway so she could eat it, but it escalated into a fight between the two of them right there at Moe's ending with Andrew crying. All over a cookie.

All of this lead me to what John Gottman in "The Seven Princples for Making Marriage Work" calls flooding. What that kind of means is any little thing that happens (like your wife and son having a fight over a freakin' cookie) floods your mind with all the built up bad memories, anxieties, anger, frustration, resentment from the past.

So there I was in the car on the way home saying out loud to no one there, "We are going to get a divorce, we are going to get a divorce." Arghhh!!!!!!

[doodler]

TiredTN,

You need to see this from your wife's perspective. You deprived her of her cookie. What good husband would do that? You should've seen this coming back when you did all of that fat talk. Are you a monster?

Talk to the hand. I don't want to discuss this anymore.

[JRuss]

They have cookies, in bulk, at Costco. Just sayin'.

[TiredTN]

lol

[TiredTN]

missed your post last time I checked in. I don't think Costco had anything to do with it...but we did join finally!

[TiredTN]

So just another weekly post. There has been a little tension this week, but not horrible, horrible. I can tell they are talking about anger when she is meeting with her therapist as she has started using some new vocabulary when she justifies it later on when we discuss.

I have not made a lot more progress in Gottman's book and feel like things have kind of stalled out. Things are definitely better than when I first started posting, but the needle hasn't moved in several weeks.

There still have been no "I love you's" from either of us. But maybe that's for the best. In the past maybe we said things that we shouldn't have and if things improve it will one day be natural to say it and mean it and if they don't it's better not said.

[MrBond]

I know you talk alot about your W's issues, etc. But have you ever seen someone for potential depression? It seems like you tie alot of your own happiness to your W's happiness. What do you do to be happy? I know you mentioned the book but what else?

[TiredTN]

So this is my first post in over a month. Things have been pretty quiet for a while. No huge drama, no huge amount of hate or anger. I think in the last three months we've had sex 3 times which is just our normal. There have been no "I love you's" from either of us...but things have been tolerable. I haven't really known how to progress and I didn't schedule another session with my divorcebusting coach, probably because we weren't in crisis and so I let it slide.

So now we are approaching crisis time again. Over the last several months she has told each kid at least once that they are stupid and told our son he is weird. That just burns me up. It's not something that happens every day. It's not like she's beating them up and locking them in the closet, but those are crushing words for a 10 and 7 year old to hear. I cannot stand that and I defend them right away if I am hearing it first hand.

Then here recently someone in the community passed. Older gentleman, very influential in the community...and she went on and on about, "who is this guy that he is so important?! What did he ever do?" She went somewhere and got slowed down by the funeral procession and starts texting me about how this guys funeral procession "outdid your (my) dad's" and how she "hates small town politics" and on and on. So I text her back that,"Someone died and people are paying their respects." and she replies back with some more choice texts. Then I text her something I have been wanting to ask for years, "Why are you so bitter?"

Well...That was Monday, this is Wednesday and we've hardly spoken since then.

Today is "cleaning day"...she cleans the house every wednesday, which is nice, we have a very clean house. The problem is she is kind of pissed the whole time she is cleaning...every Wednesday. I work out of the house and I'll be on the phone and she wants to vacuum my office. That's ridiculous and she gets even more pissed if I ask her to wait.

So now we just aren't really talking at all. Oh yes and on another front several of the insurance carriers (health insurance) in TN will no longer be paying commission come Jan 1. So I lose 75% of my income in January. Just a little added stress.

My anxiety level is through the roof and I just don't know which way to turn.