ShootingStar1

I've been gone almost a year from my husband. Fled last July 4th because his alcohol and other addictions and verbal abuse became intolerable.

Filed for divorce, and we signed the papers in April, waiting for the Judge to sign them.

Rebuilding my life, on my own. Went through emotional hell to get here, but I am happy, contented on my own.

Now I have been back to the house we co-own doing the work we have to do to get it ready to sell. No way out but to be there and do it until it is done or the financial loss will be huge. When you're in h%ll, keep on going as Churchill said.

Now he has cut way way back on his drinking and his thinking is returning to rational. He is not the psychotic abusive man he was a year ago. His brain is not pickled anymore.

He is greatly remorseful about what he did. He wants me back. He has apologized and said he thinks he just went crazy. He is so so sorry for what he did and how he treated me. It is genuine.

He asked me to take him back, on my terms, to let him court me. I was kind to him, but I went home and signed an offer to buy a small home in the new town I have fallen in love with.

As I drove home again today, having been at the house with him doing the necessary work, I think I carried his grief home with me. I feel so bad, so unbelievably sad and grief-stricken that this has happened. I am seeing our 20 years of marriage dismantled before me, room by room, box by box, as we clear out the house we built together.

All I could do on the way home was cry and cry and cry. What came to my mind is that I am so so very very sorry, and that i cannot take the burden back on my back of living with him again and carrying his sorrow and his anger.

Will this pain never end? The man I liked, I laughed with, I loved, has returned, chastened and remorseful but I appear to be gone.

I don't know if I can make it on my own financially, and my age is against me, but I seem to be following God's path for me, and all I can do is trust and believe that what I need will be provided. It is not going to be an easy path for me ahead financially. I seem to be doing what I need to do to try my best to deal with it.

My boundaries for other people's feelings are very permeable. He is not inflicting his feelings on me. I am just so aware of how alone he is, and I understand how that came to be, but it makes me so full of sorrow as I see myself treat him with compassion, but drive home alone.

How do I deal with these feelings? I miss him so much, the good parts, the humor, the wit, the light of intelligence that is again in his eyes.

But still I get into my car and push "Go home" on the GPS and drive away without him to a life I have not let him enter. How can this be so d#mn hard to love him, begin to find him again, and yet leave him? And to have to tell him that I will not, cannot come back, even as I face the loneliness of living without him? Yet every day I get into the car and "Go home".

ShootingStar1