What strikes me first is that I hope you are prioritising daily actions - whatever works for you - to take very good care indeed of your mental and physical wellbeing. Imho this is a priority for every LBS in the first year or so post BD, and it is even more important if you have experience of anxiety or depression in your past. These situations are often like a rather relentless ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and it takes fortitude and a solid core to limit the personal damage from them.
Are you doing this?This is probably even more important with some kind of ‘spouse in the house’ situation bc you are exposed to the rollercoaster of it every day in both big and small ways. And usually the turmoil and uncertainty of a crisis spouse, whether they are at home or not, runs for YEARS not months before it gets better. So imho, making YOUR wellbeing an active priority, regardless of what is happening around you, is an absolute necessity bc everything else in your life - your kids wellbeing, your work, your finances, your future - rests on it. And that is as true if you are standing for your marriage bc that demands a lot, or if you decide to live a new separated life bc that demands a lot too or if you divorce bc that demands a lot as well.
Are you doing what you need to do to stabilise and strengthen yourself if you knew that you have years of this kind of crazy s$it ahead of you?Right now, my sense is that you are trying to hunker down bc you believe that your chances of getting what you want, or perhaps avoiding what you don’t want, are higher if your wife stays in the home, albeit in the annex? That’s ok if that’s how you feel...that may change, it may not, events outside your control may change the situation anyways...it is early days and that’s ok. But if that is what you are choosing to do at the moment, then my tough love message is that you are going to need to recalibrate your own behaviour and expectations accordingly. You are going to need a good set of solid boundaries to adapt to the circumstances, and working boundaries out under this kind of pressure is something most of us find pretty hard and confusing initially. You said in your very first post I think that you believe your relationship with your wife, even in past good times, had a lot of codependency in it where you were the practical caretaker of grown up things? If so, boundaries are going to feel counter-intuitive, scary and very uncomfortable to get going with. And probably your wife is not going to like it when/if you do bc it is going to feel uncomfortable for her too as she is used to the old version of your relationship pattern....and usually that means more anger, acting out or conflict which will feel even more uncomfortable for you. You can see I think why this is not easy to change in oneself and why it takes time and trial and error to do so.
Are you talking to your own IC about this as a priority?Boundaries are about what we will allow, accept and invest energy in once we see the limits of what we can control or influence. They are not pleas, they are not negotiations, they are not ultimatums, they are not punishments, they are not manipulations. They are simply our own No thank you lines. What are some of yours, do you think? So, taking the car example.....if it happened again....you have choices. What you did was went out to explore, got told to go away by your wife and a couple of strangers and then retreated back to the house. That was one choice....but there are others available to you. You could have ignored it, for instance, called the police as others said, locked the front door from the inside etc etc....i’m not saying these are easy choices without uncomfortable consequences, that’s true. And benefits too, bc for instance you could have made choices that perhaps made a situation worse....took a sledgehammer to the car headlights or punched the driver in the face
What I am saying is that the choice you made was a message, to you and others, about where your boundary lines currently are if that makes sense.
With the gift of hindsight, what do you think you could or should have done?I suppose what i am trying to encourage you to do is accept that you are not in Kansas anymore
To look with a cool eye at the current reality that you are sharing a house with a wife in an annex who is going to do whatever she wants, who is not a reliable or trustworthy partner or parent or who will bring drama and uncertainty to the table regardless of what you do. And that, regardless f your opinion or feelings about it, she does writ large have the right as an independent human adult to choose a path for her own life along with the effects of that choice. Not your barnyard, not your manure as another poster here sometimes says
Besudes, you probably have enough of your own life manure to deal with right now
Tto make a solid plan for how you are going to adjust your own way of going about things accordingly if you are choosing to let that play out which feels do-able, and protects you and your kids from as much collateral damage as possible. Figuring out that plan will naturally raise issues for you about what feels do-able and what does not....and therefore your own boundaries about how you choose to live. Make sense? That might include some basics....a morning routine which does not involve your wife, a car of your own so you can do things independently, finding a back up support system for child care or emergencies. It might involve bigger things like how much or little time you spend together as a set of four vs two sets of three, or a financial plan, or taking my legal advice about your rights and obligations, or considering your own physical and emotional safety, or how to balance your work commitments with solo parenting particularly if your job changes or if you can end the wife in the annex situation legally if you reach a point when you choose to. Again, make sense? We truly do get how easy this is to type and how very, very hard it is to begin doing.
but imho the basic principle is to put your hopes of better quietly in a box to one side (bc you are allowed to hope) and push yourself to accept that this IS the current reality of how things are for the foreseeable future based on what you currently know.....and you have the right to make a plan that works best for you and your kids as far as you can.
If you knew that this situation was going to last for, say, another year, or three, until your daughter’s were 9 and 7 say, what would that plan be, my friend? I remember that one of the most helpful things a friend said to me when my mother was disappearing fast into dementia was that there was no Good Answer, just the honest best of a bunch of Not Great Answers I could come up with for an awful situation that I didn’t create and couldn’t change. Strangely, there was a kind of peace in that, in being able to lay down the weight of trying to find the Perfect Answer that was going to make everything ok and make the horrid stuff go away. Bc it was beyond my pay grade and trying to find the Good Answer was exhausting. Again, jmo, but I think that is usually the situation we LBS find ourselves in for quite a while post BD....and it is exhausting,disheartening and rather lonely, isn’t it? Sometimes though good enough is good enough. And I hope you know that you have support here from a lot of folks who have waded through the mud you are currently wading through x
....it was at that moment the ground gave way and I started to fall into the sea
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