Sage and peaceful- thank you for your clarifying and encouraging thoughts. I appreciate you taking the time to read through my ramblings and respond!!! I think knowing I’m not on an island really helps.
Woodland- knowing that you’ve already traced a path with uncanny parallels to the one I’m teetering around on right now gives me hope that I’ll find the end. Yep, I’m neck deep in the puddles on that path now. Still is a one-sided communication model, although the AW calls others in the family hoping to get my daughter on the e phone. So far my daughter has declined to talk to her mom even if I’m not present. I believe that bothers my wife, but damn near 6 months in rehab and has not requested to see my daughter face to face (she’s blown off two supposed Zoom calls with no explanation). With my daughters therapists help I drafted up some holiday ground rules that will hopefully head off a “mom ambush” at any family Xmas functions. I don’t believe I have transparency from the AW’s parents… lip service support yes, actual therapeutic and reasonable planning…no.
Trying to decide if uncovering all the oddities she’s thrown in the mix while she’s been in rehab (emotional, and probable physical infidelity, phantom spending of thousands of dollars, rampant social media use, burner phones, having her therapist leave me a threatening VM telling me if I contact any employees of that facility will result in them taking legal action against me…yes the crazy train), has ramped up my codependent behavior. It has made me take a hard, hard look in the mirror to see if the way I handled our 18-year marriage was me being overbearingly codependent or so hands off, I was the ultimate enabler. Really a conundrum I’m looking hard at.
I am for sure going to use tools I have now to find some happiness moving forward. Not that I’m bubbly every day…just the opposite. Having to work back through the joint bank account to 2013 to when I forced her to get her own in 2019 and tie her spending behaviors together jointly and autonomously to submit to my attorney was hard. It threw me into about a 3 day tailspin where I’d drop off the kid at school, come home, crawl back into bed till noon just to get the mental bandwidth back in line for my work and ready to help kid with homework practice hoops, get a good dinner ready…
It comes down to this is adulting 301…not 101. There’s no cushion, no flunking out, no do-overs. I’m the role model, which is a privilege and daunting task at the same time. In reality, the wild card of who’s going to be behind door #1 every day is gone making it a little easier. But the emotional and physical hole in the relationship with me the AW left is going to take a long, long time to figure out.
I appreciate everyone here, whether you are sharing advice and opinions, or wading through the muck and that curvey line that we are all chasing called healing…peace to you.