Thanksgiving was stressful. The first one post-divorce, D decided she wanted to cook and host us at her apartment. I ended up running errands picking up ingredients, taking out trash, etc, while she prepped, and the kids and I were finally were admitted late in the evening for dinner around 8 PM. She made a great spread (she’s always been a fantastic cook), and I did some cleaning while she finished. The food was fantastic, but the conversation ventured into political territory, a subject about which D’s always had strong opinions, and the kids, especially P, are beginning to have equally strong feelings, so there was a degree of tension when D regurgitated tinfold hat anti-government conspiracy theories and I pushed back. P is SO shell-shocked and conflict-averse that I could tell it was really stressing her out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My heart continues to break for her, and it’s hard to know what to do. As far as she’s concerned, Daddy kicked Mommy out of the house mid-year, and continues to heartlessly insist she can’t return. D’s made real overtures to bond with her, which is fine as far as that goes, but one of the effects is to ally P very closely with D’s perspective on the divorce, a worldview in which I’m the bad guy, or at least equally responsible for the marriage’s breakdown, and thus what I’ve “inflicted” on D seems excessive and disproportionate. Nevermind the fact that she had literal YEARS to get her ducks in a row, as it were, and find a job and learn how to be independent, but only did the former after being obviously conned by a man who promised her the moon, and really doesn’t seem to have any desire to do the latter, at least not fully, given the number of things it’s still requested that I do for her. And I’m OK with doing them, generally speaking; it would just be nice to see more concerted movement toward independence. She got very<\/em> used to relying on me to keep the family and the house on the rails, and the way she’s continuing to act makes me feel even more exhausted and taken for granted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But back to P. She’s so traumatized by the whole experience that she just wants to move away, attend a college in NC (preferably App State in Boone) and live in the dorm and be away from the place where her family was torn apart. I get that; I really do, and I want to make it happen for her, but 1) the financial picture is tricky\u2014not impossible, just tricky\u2014and 2) her natural instincts prompt her to venture in the direction of independence only rarely. For example, she got her driver’s license before L did, but has only driven by herself once, to Walmart and back. L drives himself to work and back every weekend, and to school and back twice a week. And she’s still hesitant to make phone calls, even to people she knows, and she needed me to help her talk to her supervisors at work about returning from college leave. These aren’t hard things. So, she talks a good game, but the reality is that she’s not where she needs to be in order to live her dreams of independence. I’m gently helping to nudge her in that direction\u2014which is maybe all I need to do at this juncture. Just staying in the game is hard some days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Thanksgiving was stressful. The first one post-divorce, D decided she wanted to cook and host us at her apartment. I ended up running errands picking up ingredients, taking out trash, etc, while she prepped, and the kids and I were finally were admitted late in the evening for dinner around 8 PM. She made a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3319"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3319"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3319\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3329,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3319\/revisions\/3329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}