Cadet - I found your welcome thread, but only through a google search. Perhaps there is an easier place to post it.
Regarding anger, I'm still bouncing between not caring at all, feeling guilty about things that I did that could have kept our marriage together to anger at what my wife has dumped on me and the pain and damage she's given to my kids, the extra workload, and that she'll be getting money and not working while I work twice as hard. The anger is at its worst when I'm feeling time pressured, so I have to both work on my reaction to time pressure and figure out how to manage the additional workload. It will still take me some time to detach.
I still haven't detached from my deceased son, but trauma specialists say that you never do, but that it does diminish.
Vacation was great with the two kids, and it didn't feel weird not to have my wife there (it would have been worse with her there - I think she would have complained too much).
The kids were going to visit their mother before college started, but then decided that they wouldn't have enough time. I suggested that they go for a weekend (it's only four hours), but that obviously means that seeing her has moved down in their priorities. They did have a lively skype with her for 1.5 hours that I heard echoing through the house.
One word to walkaway or runaway spouses - don't neglect or abandon your kids, because my experience shows that they will move away from you, as mine appear to have from their mother. Also, the research indicates that parental abandonment really screws them up, even if they are college kids (and college kids are still kids and need parents, as I've learned this year).
The comments about depression in the material posted about detachment is right on. Another source I read said that 80% of the people in his divorce recovery classes had at least one spouse with a mental problem. I've continued to see the marriage counselor after my wife left as an individual therapist (and at times there are two therapists in the session, with the other training mine in trauma therapy/EMDR). He said that my wife cutting off her kids is a sign that she is in a state of extreme grieving (called complicated grief).
Anyone curious about it can read The Deep End of the Ocean, a novel about a mother emotionally abandoning her kids and her husband after their middle child was kidnapped. The author interviewed numerous people who'd had kids kidnapped before she wrote it; in the story, the wife behaved much like mine has.
Another note: A week ago, I was feeling terrible because it would have been my deceased son's 18th birthday.
I had been reading a mini-bio about a retired professional athlete who wrote a trend-setting best-seller that made him far more famous, and how he had become depressed for several years when his child died in an accident. I've read his book four or five times, starting when I was 12, and for some reason, I emailed the link on his web site about hiring him as a speaker, telling him what I was experiencing and asking him how he dealt with the death of his daughter. He called me back two hours later, and gave me some helpful advice.
Just shows you that people who connect with you/ feel or have felt the same pain will reach out if you reach out to them.
My son had his 4th car accident in the past 12 months today. This one wasn't his fault, although a prudent driver (including me) could have avoided it. Poor driving is another ADHD trait.
I think I'm going to stop him from driving for a while and have him take some defensive driving lessons.
I'd also like to put my wife on an iceberg or on a spaceship to deep space. Sorry folks, but I'm not going to give up the anger when all this was simply dumped on me. She's retried now at age 53; because of state laws that don't take into account educational expenses, I'll get cleaned out and never get to retire.
