Hi again, pbetra, I have always thought that the opposite of love isn't hate, indifference is. If I didn't still care about my W I wouldn't "feel" the way I do, I just wouldn't care. I can't understand how she can become so like the man and woman who ripped her life apart. She is spending all her free time with her father and his wife (the woman who was having sex with her father when he was still married to her mother all while pretending to be friends with her mom AND her. She told me how this woman worked for her father when she was just 10 years old and how she would be so very nice to her, more than any of the other people that worked for her father. She then found out that was because she was sleeping with her father and wanted him to leave her mom).
It has occurred to me that she does these things because she thinks she can get away with them. That by wearing my "white hat", all I'm doing is showing myself to be a doormat. Maybe this is why my W is so keen on getting a D. She thinks that she will be able to keep everything she wants, have all the access to her "old" life she wants if she feels like it and I'll still be around to pick up the pieces if she ever needs me to. Since her MLC I have noticed that my W seems to mold herself into the kind of person she is with the most. She is now molding herself into her father and step mother, the two worst people I know! I actually saw texts from both of them congratulating her for hiding money from me when we were dead broke! Who told her that if she would file for D instead of just separating, he would pay for it but only if she did it right away. My W wanted, just before filing, for my D14 to spend the summer with her dad and his wife alone, 1000 miles away in another state. I know for a fact that he didn't want to do this, had no intention of doing it but he knew I wouldn't want her to go and that I would protest and it would drive my W and I further apart. Well, it worked. Just before she filed I told her that our D didn't want to go and I didn't want her to either. My W was furious! Told me that I was "clinging" to my D (something she never would have come up with on her own, something her father would say) and that D "needs to have her grandfather in her life". No, she doesn't. All that man can teach her is how NOT to act, live, do. Right after that it turned out that her father never intended to go back home so he couldn't have had her there for the summer. It was all a set up to drive W's emotions towards D!
To manipulate a person so obviously going through a crisis in their life, your own D no less, that you admit you hurt badly all her life, for your own selfish reasons is just evil. He is telling everyone (including his grand daughters) that he is dying. He looks really bad from the chemo and he tells everyone he sees "This is what death looks like" while holding out his arms and laughing. So, if he thinks he will be gone soon, how sick is it to push his almost 50 year old D into ending a 20 year marriage and set her up to be alone or to have to settle for whatever person MAY be out there that is decent and not weighed down by baggage? The answer is he just doesn't care. He is selfish and controlling and a narcissist. Instead of thinking that he can die knowing his D is LOVED and has someone in her life that cares greatly for her, he is pushing her to leave her old life just so she can take care of him before he dies. When he is gone all she will have is the memories of her father dying in front of her. 40 years of not caring at all about her. Seeing her every couple years and insulting her when he did and he would have her destroy her family just to spend what little time he has left with her. How does that "make up" for all the bad he has done to her? How can my W buy this crap?
I have a feeling that my W isn't getting what she thought she would from leaving. She still isn't sleeping. She isn't suddenly so very happy and a better mother. For now she can still blame me and by the way she is acting it is clear that she must. Nothing I do or say can change that she has choose to think this way as I never did anything that could possibly have caused her anything near the pain she is in. Until she realizes this she will run from her "old" life, hurt everyone who cares about her. I have real fear for my D14 if she ever needs to depend on her mother. I fear what my W will do and who she will become as the realization of what she has done hits her down the road. She is so very lost and is going deeper and deeper into the woods every day. One day she will stop running and look back and see that she is totally lost. What happens then?
Matt, What happens when she stops running, well, there are two schools of thought here: 1)she'll hit bottom and seek out professional help and begin slowly waking up and reconnecting w/those she has hurt; or 2)she'll remain lost and confused forever and become the bitter person who remains stuck as a middle aged teenager wannabe.
Let's hope and pray she finds herself and wakes up enough to seek professional help.
Sit quietly, the answers will reveal themselves when you least expect them to. The past is gone, the present is a gift and you need to focus on today, allow the future to reveal itself when it is ready.
