[amazinglove]

Well we officially got through Xmas and New Year's Eve, our first without their dad.

My goal was just to get through it without massive emotional drama/suffering and with those minimum expectations, I would say we actually soared. I did buy way too much for the kids for Xmas (VR headset, X Box) and I will happily put my hand up as an 'overcompensater", but I wanted to distract from the fact that this year was a painful milestone, and I have to say, it worked. No one mentioned him on the day. I am sure he was in the back of all of our minds, but no one, even my 8 year old, wanted to break the mood. I asked both kids if they wanted to speak to him on Xmas eve and both said no. I blocked him on What's App all week (he is still blocked) because it was too painful. He missed our son's bday, Xmas and New Year's, by choice - and so i just wrote to him, 'I need to block you for a few days, I can't bear your selfishness sometimes." It was as honest and kind as I could be. And it helped me immensely not to have his near daily check ins.

Unbeknownst to me, the day before Xmas eve, my D (11) reached out via text to her dad. Her words to him were unflinching and brutal (and reasonable) and I was so proud of her for expressing her anger to him directly. She has been angry at everyone and everything else for months. He just replied "I'm so sorry darling" but nothing else. Without him saying, I'm coming back to the US to be your dad, there really is nothing he could say that would make her feel better. But he's never had words. FYI she's not trying to get us back together - in fact she told me if you ever take dad back i will never speak to you again - but she wants him to show her that she's worth sticking around for. When in fact, right now, the truth is (crisis or no) that nothing and no one matters more to him than himself.

He wrote me and screen shot what she had sent and said he felt like he had fallen off a 100 foot cliff. He said he was devestated by it. I told him it was just a glimpse of the reality he's running from, the cost of the choices he's making - the love and respect of his kids. He said everyone warned him, if you keep going like this, 'you will lose your kids' and I said, well, I will never try to turn them against you for sure, and I will always encourage a relationship with you, but yes, you will. You certainly will. It was a painful exchange from my side. in fact the whole holiday was painful. I escaped to my room more than once to just cry. It felt like he has just walked away without a backward glance (well maybe a backward glance, he begged me on Xmas to pls send photos of the day) from our 15 years of Christmases together. Truth be told, I am still mourning the man I loved, I love still. I wonder if that will ever stop. Because he's not here on this earth now and I worry that I will never, ever meet him again.

Someone wise wrote on here that we come to this forum for more than healing our pain - it's to deal with our confusion - how did this happen? how can this happen? who is the person that is completely different from the person I knew and loved for years? My husband loved Christmas, he was devoted to me and his children, there is no where he wanted to be other than with his family - but now he sees being with us as akin to being in a prison and despite knowing he's lost me and is losing his children, like really losing them, he won't/can't turn back.

In one exchange I told him - when our son ( sends you a video on his own birthday pleading with you,  'daddy please come home', the fact that that does not make you book a ticket, run to an airport, get on a plane - that part of yourself - you need to take a hard look at. That has nothing to do with our marriage, that has to do with you.  But, as most of you can attest, nothing I say really lands, and certainly nothing bears fruit.

Last night on NYE, I saw couples in Times Square (on TV) kissing at midnight and felt a sharp pang. He is with his OW almost certainly, kissed her at midnight, and last NYE was their first trip away together (when my friend spotted him in Heathrow T5 and I first discovered he was cheating on me). Brutal. But this year, the bottom has already fallen out. I know where I am standing. I may be in the basement but I am sure of the ground under my feet. I am not where I was. I can't possibly know what he thinks about his new year, what he looks ahead to, what he's looking forward to - but I spent mine laughing and dancing with my 79 year old mom, my amazing badass prosecutor sister and my two kids. At midnight (we celebrate NYC midnight, our PST 9pm!) my son remembered I had bought glow sticks and I also had giant confetti guns. We unleashed it all. It was wild. My floor looked like a nightclub by the end. It was 3 inches thick in confetti and glow sticks. (148 of them) We blasted music and my daughter and son danced with us to their favorite pop songs. It was joyful. We all feel like survivors now. There was definitely no place I would rather have been.

One thing we did, which I had heard was an old Irish tradition (which btw my irish friends say they've never heard of) but we opened the front door and back door at midnight - to let the new year's good luck in and let the bad luck out. It felt particularly apt. There is so much I want to let out the back door of my life and so much I want to let in. I woke up today, the first day of the new year feeling optimistic and hopeful. I made banana waffles (they were perfection today), and took a moment alone to enjoy the beautiful SoCal weather/scenery and felt lighter than I have in a long time.

I am moving ahead with plans for a move -I talk to the realtor tomo and I think we've landed on a model and lot. I had a burst of energy over the break and tackled all the divorce /settlement paperwork, screen shot some relevant text messages, bank statments, tax returns, letters from school, etc - I need one adjustment from the mediator tomo and then I can drop it all off and hopefully get a court date in the v near future. I cleaned out his side of the bathroom cupboards this week too. Again, hard, a fair amt of pain, but necessary. And I am still standing.

One night over the break my daughter cried in my arms - she felt like I had rejected her or dismissed her in some way - and she said to me - "don't you get it, you're all I have now". It was heart rending. I gently reminded her that she has lots of other people who love her - but yes, she has me, and she has me forever, and I will never, ever leave her. And that we are enough.

[Flummoxed]

This was a beautiful update, amazinglove- it sounds like you all had a great holiday season overall! I felt that NYE pang too- but glad you pivoted out of that space and danced the night away with loved ones. Three cheers for your productivity and strength- amazing work!

[Treasur]

“But this year, the bottom has already fallen out. I know where I am standing. I may be in the basement but I am sure of the ground under my feet.”

And that is something, isn’t it? Well done you. And well done for shifting your eye to squeezing every bit of delight possible out of the festive season.

I don’t know if you make NY resolutions or goals. Lots of research about why these often don’t stick, so I tend to prefer intentions or a kind of compass fix. I suspect that one of the things you may find helpful is to continue to mostly keep him blocked on Whats App and really minimise those exchanges you have about his sadz though. Bc I’m not sure how useful it is with a little bit of time and perspective but it does tend to keep us emotionally engaged to some degree, doesn’t it?

It’s such a confusing and bewildering experience for both the LBS and the kids involved, a lot of layers to pick through. But I think most of us eventually get to a point where their sadz don’t carry the same weight. A point when it makes sense to simplify things a bit perhaps, to fall back on some of those old sayings. That sorry actually is as sorry does. That peoples’ feet tell you more about their real priorities than their mouths. That actions carry natural consequences without our involvement bc  cause and effect is a real thing lol. That you don’t have to hate someone to step away from what they bring to the party. That we are not obliged to try to make people feel better about causing us harm. That we reap what we sow with time. That feelings are not facts. That people have the right to plot their own course and captain their own ship, even those closest to us, even if we don’t like it….but we are not obliged to be passengers on their ship. That the things or people that hurt us are rarely the things or people that heal us.

Jmo but I think it’s quite rare that humans set out to intentionally hurt us. The simpler truth usually is that they do not care enough about whether they hurt us or not, that what they want in a given moment is more important to them than we are to them.

That’s not a very nice thought either, is it, that we might matter to some extent but not enough? That your stbxh might genuinely feel sorry or upset by your daughter’s words to some degree….but not enough to behave differently. That some bit of him might indeed miss those Christmas moments….but not enough to behave differently. The more we see that, painful as it can be to see how much or how little we really are a priority that matters to someone who matters to us, I think it gets easier to get to a point where their feelings about what they are choosing just generates a kind of internal shrug. When their sadz or sorry or doubt or wishes just don’t matter as much as they once did bc they do not outweigh their choices. And that it just isn’t our job to tidy up any of the natural consequences, to send pictures of a life they chose to leave or soothe their sadz or continue to prioritise their needs when they do not prioritise ours.

Tbh doing so in a way is even interfering in how adults learn from natural cause and effect, isn’t it? If you leave your wife and kids, it’s a pretty basic effect that you no longer have the same kind of relationship or role in their future lives? And maybe that’s ok or ok enough on balance for you, maybe that ends up being good for you, idk, I imagine for some perhaps it does. But it’s a simple law of life that you can’t make a big change in life that affects others without expecting a whole bunch of things to change perhaps in some ways you didn’t expect.

I don’t know why MLC folks seem to be so often a bit surprised by that or try to keep hold of some bits of what they had or imagine that everyone else just freezes where they left them, but it’s not uncommon that they do. We LBS usually can’t even if we want to for a while…events and reality usually force us into seeing that change brings changes. It seems to take MLC folks a bit longer to get that life works that way naturally…perhaps bc they work harder to avoid reality while we are working hard to find a way to accept it, idk. Some….although they seem to be few in number..  do eventually get there and find themselves wanting to fix some of what they broke but I’m not sure how anyone can do that without at least having to face the very practical reality of how things are bc of their own choices. And of course time plays a part in how many burned bridges there are….and how solid the new reality becomes for everyone else. It’s pretty difficult in life for all of us to squeeze the toothpaste back in the tube even if we really, really want to 😝

I hope though that your own 2025 toothpaste brings more and more good things regardless of how your stbxh squeezes his!

[Treasur]

A PS….the fact that your stbxh took the time to screenshot your daughter’s message and send it to you saying he was devastated suggests to me that he still thinks you are someone who can/should either fix something difficult for him or be emotionally supportive in some way to him. Can’t think of another reason why he’d do that tbh. Can you? He had other choices, of course, including how he responded to your daughter, but that was his response. Most of us LBS, with the benefit of hindsight, do tend to see that this was part of the role we played in our marriages….a combination perhaps of our innate caretaking instincts and their limited adulting capabilities.

We usually fail spectacularly to improve their adulting but we can choose to change things up by reducing our caretaking….

Some, perhaps my xh as a vanisher, find that caretaking fix with an ow replacement and stop looking for it from us; others maybe like your stbxh don’t get that from the ow so keep looking to us for it. But most of us come to see that there is an emotional glitch with these folks, a neediness in them somehow.

Still not about you or your kids though of course

It’s your choice whether you want to resign from that assigned role or not. Not uncommon tbh that MLC folks are surprisingly emotionally co dependent and poor at boundaries….but it’s ok for you to choose what works best for you regardless of what he wants or expects. I know you know that, but sometimes we all need to be reminded of what we know lol

I do wonder, in the spirit of keeping it simple, if our basic LBS boundaries are founded on a sort of ‘do as you’re prepared to be done unto’ basic reciprocity but just flipping it on its head. We LBS often say something like ‘well, I’m going to do x bc that’s the kind of person I am’ and end up dolling out way more than we receive. But if we turned that around to something more like a mirror? If our ex/spouse does not send photos of their Xmas hi jinks or even tell us where they are, why should we? If they do not act as a support to us, why should we expect that from ourselves? I suspect that most LBS boundaries are less about what we want and more about deciding to stop giving what we are not receiving beyond basic decency and legal obligations. And that plan probably depends on our individual situations, doesn’t it? But starts with the basic principle that no adult is entitled to receive anything from us if they are not behaving with some reciprocal respect or just bc they want it. Anything else is childish or just a disordered sense of entitlement…..neither are a good look on a grown up 😝

[amazinglove]

Hi all - just an update. I hope you all are cruising out of the January doldrums/dry season into a fabulous February. I feel like that's where I'm headed. I had Covid before Xmas and then I've just had a surgery on Jan 7th which has kind of been a double whammy on my energy levels and all around good time. I am still in bandages and sore but it was elective and I have no regrets (so far)- it will hopefully help my lower back and overall health.

So, the OW, the Moscow Mule/Super Gran reached out and requested to follow my sister on IG.

Now, this horror of a woman has only 4 followers (2 are my husband and 1 is his younger sister) and follows a grand total of 14 people so she is not exactly casually following all sorts and sundry. it was not a sublte move. Her IG profile is public but there are zero photos up. My sister puts murderers in jail and is therefore hard to find on any social portals (obvs) and you would have to snoop my husband's own IG feed to even be able to find my sis. Well, that old heifer did. My sis sent me a screenshot and wrote to my h and said 'Why is this woman who is clearly your 'girlfriend' requesting to follow my IG account?! this is ridiculous!" he replied 'I'm so sorry. This should be a terrible mistake. Please do not take it seriously."

to the expert analysts in the group: (and full disclosure KayDee has kindly already given me some incredible insight on this offline) here are my takeaways:

1) it's a message to me (I should add here, that as soon as I figured out who she was, I blocked her a year ago so she can not find me on IG or even see my profile pic and my FB settings are that if you are not my friend you cannot message me) that says 'I AM HERE. I am not going anywhere. I am bold and I am not afraid of you."

2) the fact that even after my sister confronted my h - the request is STILL THERE - says that my h is afraid to even to say 'hey my SIL was not thrilled by this crazy move you made - so just take it down" he has not even confronted her about it!!! or he has and she said no?

3) do you think she wants to send like photos or screenshots to make sure i never take him back? like to hurt me to make sure i let him go?

4) it's a message to my H that is a not veiled at all threat. leave me and i will blow this up. 

5) their relationship, based on lies and selfishness has bred mistrust and the house of cards is falling at long last.

let me say this - I know that this affair is not why we are not together. it is a symptom of a much bigger problem - his desire to be free of all responsibility, his lack of genuine care for me and the kids, his selfishness, his identity crisis etc. and even when this affair ends he and i should not be together unless he is a v diff human than he is now. and he has done none of the work to make that happen. i get it. but i also want this relationship destroyed, this monster out of his life and both of them miserable and punished every minute they are in each other's toxic company. she was part of the equation that blew up my life and caused me immeasurable pain - she is a schemer and i want justice. Whoever he is with next, i wil never have the vitriol for her that I have and will forever have for this one.

has this kind of thing happened to any of you? the OW got in touch not with you, but someone in your IMMEDIATE family? what was their motivation?

[Treasur]

Jmo, but yes…it’s a playbook type of behaviour.
And it’s about attention and/or control. Bc you were smart enough to block her and lock your social media down tight, she looked for another way to insert herself into your life.

I got months of ‘anonymous’ messages and threats. Others here have had OW contact them directly, even show up at their front door. I think I even remember a case when ow sent her own teenage child to the door as a messenger 🙄 Others, when the ow lived closer, have had her show up at local stores, send messages via ‘friends’ or family, or perhaps worst of all, use the LBS’s own children.

The disordered crave centrality. Attention. Importance.
If they can’t squeeze into your life, they want to be in your head. And often, from stories here, it is also part of a power play in their relationship with your spouse.

But I would not waste a moment on even musing on her motivation tbh. Bc if you do, she wins.
Just shut that s&it down.
If you’d asked, I’m not sure I would have agreed with contacting your xh about it. Waste of time from your PoV (as it was in my situation even when I got threats) and more importantly, it feeds the beast.
Nothing hurts these folks like being ignored and treated as insignificant to you and your kids.

And that’s accurate….she isn’t YOUR ow, she has no role in your life other than as a person that your stbxh invited into his. She’s a stranger to you and your kids….and a oretty strange kind of stranger lol.

So, behave accordingly, just as if she was some random weirdo stranger that tried to slide into your DMs or ypur sister’s in this case. Block, block, blockety block. And ignore. Give her no thought at all. And if she escalates, keep ignoring and take legal recourse. Sharing her V@g!n@ with your stbxh does not earn her a role in your life or the right to be heard by you or your family 😜  All you need to know, you already know, that this woman does not have good intentions towards you and your kids’ wellbeing. So just say a big fat No. (and perhaps assume that any message you send to your stbxh will also be seen by her bc well, control, and choose your words accordingly)

On the bigger issue of karmic justice….
Well, a bunch of us have struggled with that and it can keep us mentally attached to things that don’t serve us well.
You have to let it go. Sadly sometimes life doesn’t work out that way and these are not folks who see the world the way we do so our version of ‘justice’ doesn’t affect them the same way. The best that seems to apply is that their karma is to be them, and that playing s&it games produces s$itty prizes. In this case, she wins your weak man child and gets to financially support him until she dies or he runs off with a better/newer prospect. It’s often true here that we see karma play out but long after we care so much….that we see just how s&it the ‘prize’ was for both of them with time, that their real punishment is getting exactly what they created. There’s a predictability to that, to the karma of creating a new life based on deceit and self obsession, which usually means some version of reaping what one sows. But it usually works a bit slower than we might wish to see. Tbh it’s not uncommon that when LBS do see it, years later, it doesn’t even make us feel as good as we thought it might…it just seems like a rather sad bit of all round self-destruction at great cost to others for nothing much of value at all.

But that is THEIR karma.
Let it play out without ypur fingers in it or without the need to watch. Trust that the universe eventually usually follows the principle of poor fruit from poor soil. Much better to focus on your own karma and your own soil.. it just takes most of us a little while to get the hang of that and to work through the entirely fair and reasonable feelings of being helpless in the face of other peoples’ life changing harmful actions.

Hope you are on the mend now xxx

And a PS. Yes it’s weird behaviour. I have no doubt that, given your sister’s profession, she gets that and will be happy to blockety blockety block without much further thought 😜

[zartheit]

I've got a--perhaps too--abstract take on things. I found this style of looking helpful which is why I'm attempting to share it. Please discard anything that doesn't resonate.

So, the OW, the Moscow Mule/Super Gran reached out and requested to follow my sister on IG.

What I see here is someone you don't like sending a friend request to someone you do. Everything else is an implication based on a particular interpretation of some event in this towering causal chain. There is layer after layer all precariously balanced on one "minor" happenstance. Is this tower "true" and "accurate"? Who knows? More to the point, is it helpful? Is it worth it?

It takes immense cognitive and emotional energy to sustain these analyses. Why perform them? What do you gain from it? How does it serve you? Does you thinking 12 moves ahead on this emotional chessboard bring you closer to your goal of... what, exactly?

For me, I used the interpretations and empathic attunement as a way of maintaining some connection with my ex. It was a method for me to pretend and feel closer to her. Maybe if I could understand her somehow, as if by magic, it would bring her back to me. In reality, it was only maintaining an emotional rope around my neck. I was my own jailer.

i want justice.

I can very much relate to this. That being said, I also wanted my spouse to not leave. I wanted my life to go back to how it was. I wanted comfort, security, and to be understood. I wanted reality to be different.

Maybe this is a bit too far out there, but I don't "believe" in justice. Justice is a concept. Justice is an expectation. Justice is a thought. Why would justice "exist"? Where did I get that idea?

That isn't to say that evil is acceptable, but it is to say that people do evil things. I WANT justice, here and now. I want the scales to be balanced, and harmony restored. But why would reality "give" that to me? Why would that be granted? I personally found it immensely freeing to accept that people are going to do whatever they're going to do whether or not they "should", whether or not I want them to, whether or not those things are evil, wrong, or bad. My spouse betrayed me. That is her right, her choice. And given that information, what will I do in response? That is my freedom. It does not rely on anything that she does, or might do. I am free right now on how to respond.

All of that is easy to write and hard to live. I didn't have any children with my ex and so I can only imagine the difficulty in navigating that. Also, my ex was a complete vanisher so I don't have to deal with any active interference. The "worst" aftermath I had was puzzling why she didn't unfriend/block me and my family.

Treasur's words on karma and reaping what one sows is something that deeply feels true to me. You can plant corn or poison, the choice is yours. It is, in a certain sense, an amplification process. We can amplify whatever we want and I feel that everyone here has chosen to amplify beauty. At the beginning it is so faint that we're scared it might not be there, but eventually it bears fruit.

[xyzcf]

Covid and then surgery, that's a lot for your body to recover from. Even we when think we are better, there are still parts of our body that require healing.

And parts of our minds and hearts as well.

I agree with zartheit and Treasur.

The latest of having the OW on IG is a trigger to you. The list of "takeaways" may or may not be true. These are what you think could be the cause of her asking for a friend request but you cannot know what is in another person's head. You can only guess.

but i also want this relationship destroyed, this monster out of his life and both of them miserable and punished every minute they are in each other's toxic company. she was part of the equation that blew up my life and caused me immeasurable pain - she is a schemer and i want justice. Whoever he is with next, i wil never have the vitriol for her that I have and will forever have for this one.

My opinion concerning their affairs, the "blame" for their adultery lies solely with the MLCer. Yes, anger is normal towards the OW but she didn't cause the crisis. You don't know what lies he has told her about you and regardless, he is the one having the crisis and as you are very aware, the affair is meaningless.

My question...if you got what you wished for in the above statement, how will this make things different for you?
Will it ease the pain of the destruction of your marriage and family?
I have not had to deal with any kind of contact or real "knowledge" about his affairs, so this is just my opinion.

Don't focus on her, don't focus on him...I know, they take up way too much space in our head and we will go along and be fine and then something will happen to push their affair in our face and we lose it ...and it hurts like hell and we want "justice"....a wise priest told me at the begining of this journey "love must be free".

We don't own our husbands, they are the ones making the choices that hurt us, not the OW.

As you know, I don't totally hold our husbands "accountable" because the crisis is a "condition" that trumps any logical reason for what they are doing, we are collateral damage to their crisis but we do have control over how much damage they can do to us.

I can't find the exact quote (someone else might know it) but I believe it is something like this "let them blow in the wind and crack their heads"..there really isn't anything we can do to force them to "see" what their actions are causing...we must focus on our own healing and part of that means we have to let go.

[Reinventing]

Agree with not focusing on the OW, as conniving as she may be. The MLCer was the one who broke their vows and broke away from the family.

...we must focus on our own healing and part of that means we have to let go.

This is part of the secret sauce to coming out of this to enjoy life on the other side.

I say a neutral statement to myself that helped: "It was his time to go."

Hope that helps someone else.

Not that I have any love for OWs, lol.

[amazinglove]

I recognize that we spend a lot of time on this forum trying to analyze our MLC spouse and perhaps we should spend more - I mean def we should - on figuring out our own detachment and healing and leaving them to their crisis. For some of us, it goes against our instinct that if we can understand it, we can fix it. I realize I am like this with every single medical ailment that comes my way, my kids' way - I research extensively because understanding it takes some of the fear or worry out of it for me. It's almost a compulsion I have, to understand things that I do not.

Anyway with that as a preamble...my stbx, MLC H is in town and we had an honest conversation ydy - I mean to say, he was being honest ab how he feels at that moment, and for the first time really, he acknowledged to me that his mental health is not good. I was glad to hear that, because that has been obvious to all of us for some time, but I was glad he's finally saying it out loud.  Before this, he was not the problem, I was or our marriage was.  He is not doing anything about it really tho, he does not appear to have moved forward in any way (still running all the time, still with AP jet setting around) which is depressing actually - no progress!? - BUT was still glad to hear him say it. Then he said something, "Coming back here, the idea of moving back here, America scares me. I'm afraid to go back to where I was.'  My understanding is that he was referencing how lost he felt, how empty he felt, how overwhelmed he felt being so far from his home country, not having a role here, which lead up to this 'crisis' where he has become an entirely different and frequently repugnant individual.

Here's my question: what do you say to someone when they say this and they really mean it? What I actually said was 'I can see that you are in pain. But you have to understand that we are also in pain. Your children had and continue to have a lot of pain from your choices. They affect us all. But what can we do? We are all doing our best to adjust to this new reality that you are not here."  But I cannot reassure him that he would be ok to move back and try to live near his kids because he probably would get lost again. He seems so fragile, delusional and weak and being close to his FOO (sister/mom) overseas seems to be keeping him up and moving day to day. he even said something about his brain deteriorating, which is v v true. I don't even know if he is sharp enough to hold down a busy job right now. He can retain v little. This last month he was in Turkey, he even moved in with his sister because my nephew was home from college and he would have someone to be with every day. Then the OW represents his chance for adventure, these vacations, and freedom and she enables/funds him to have this other, fun, dopamine filled life. The kids and I represent family, stability, but we are a hobby, something he visits, almost a living, heart-filled memory it feels like. It all serves him. We are all there to serve him, yes I can see that's how he sees it. His narcissism is terrifying to me and I truly hope it's not forever but I fear that it is. He reiterated that he does not want a divorce and just wants to leave things 'as they are.' I am pushing ahead because I do not want this to continue.

So back to my question - when having a heart to heart talk with your former partner, do you bother trying to reassure them in any way? Do you say nothing and just listen? I am trying to figure out the best way to support him or comfort/reassure but also i will never say that what he's doing is ok, and I don't want to really support any of these bad choices either if that makes sense.