I'm not sure what to do anymore.
The kids really want JC and I to get back together. I'm increasingly thinking that's impossible.
I had a chat with her on Sunday (Mother's Day - hah). I told her that I don't know how to move forward with anything because, at this pont, I have a massive "fuck you" card that I can play, pretty much forever. No matter what she does, or says, or tries to tell me, if I don't like it, I can just drop, "You don't get to tell me what to do, because you ran."
Oh, she tried to tell me, again, how she was trying to do the right thing, and that her illness convinced her it was the right thing, and all I can hear now is, "It's not my fault what happened."
And then she told me that there's no way she can be with me again unless I can give her a fresh start. If I can forgive and forget.
Sorry, I can't. I might be able to forgive. In fact, that part is pretty easy, since I do think her illness drove her to make a terrible decision (if only she'd stop telling me that it seemed like the right one at the time).
But I won't be able to forget. And no matter how well I do, no matter how hard I try, I know that someday, there will be just the right argument, and I will drop that bomb.
It's like she's a different person, and she expects me to be a different person now, too. And she expects this to happen in the wake of a terribly traumatic event. Which, by the way, was caused by her.
She told me she no longer hopes to get back together with me. She sort of wants it, but she doesn't hope for it. And she doesn't miss me. She misses the kids, but not me.
The kids still like her. Does she have any idea, even the smallest inkling, that the reason for that is because I am a good person? Because I didn't spend the last 8 months filling their ears with poison about their mother? It would have been terribly easy to ensure that our kids never wanted to see her again. In the wake of the incident, I could have simply said that she left because she doesn't love them. Over and over and over. Instead, I pursued therapy for all of us, and tried to make sure that they understood that what she did was because she was sick, not because she didn't love us, and not because of anything the kids did.
I could have initiated divorce proceedings the moment she left. I could have simply let her run forever, and not tried to find her. I could have done a million things a different way. But, no, I decided to be hopeful. To not simply burn everything down.
As for me, I'm tired of being the one who makes the sacrifices. I'm tired of being the hopeful one. For 3 years, I let hope drive my decisions, I let hope that she could recover and that we could become a family again, drive me to almost kill myself to keep the house running, to keep the children insulated against the worst of her illness, to keep everything going, by myself.
Now, she's had her escape pod, and, from some distant planet, she's saying, "I can't come back unless you can change. I don't have hope any more. I've given all I can, and that's all I can give."
She takes.
I give.
She takes.
I give.
She takes.
I stop giving.
She stops everything.
Apparently, this is what I get for all my hope.
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