Thank you careerlady.
It's a weird feeling, being both free and scared. Everything is a little harder but not as much as I thought it would be, and it´s depressing because it underscores how much I was taking on that I'm not going insane right now.
I was raised by my mother after my dad became a WH until she passed when I was young. In my country there's a lot of family support though so I never lacked a mother figure (aunts, grandmothers). But I was forced to learn to care for my own (room, clothes cleaning, etc) and was constantly surrounded by the love and support of good, strong ladies.
And now, everything I was taught tells me I shouldn't be able to do this on my own as a man - and indeed during the height of happiness in our marriage I might not have been as good about housework as I could have, with the working full time and her being a SAHM and whatnot. As she started complaining and needing "space", I started giving in more and more, and taking on more and more of the house while she went absent. Now I can run my own household without batting an eye. Yes it is hard to do it all. Yes it is lonely. But no, I don't (and never did) see housework or kid stuff as being any less, and I think she always did, sadly.
But I love my kids and I do the housework with music now so it's working great. Yet at the same time, the prospect of my children lacking a mother's unique kind of love brings tears to my eyes every time I think about it. But I can't let my daughter grow up to think the modeling she is seeing is ok.I'd rather her have a strong father figure and have her see her own aunts and grandmothers often to fill the mother figure. WW's youth was touggh, she was a ward of the state for a while because my MIL was found incompetent or something. There's a lot of damage there, but when I met her and we were so in love and her strength of character was so great I thought it had been resolved.
I don't want WW to lose the kids. But if it takes ending up with visitation to shake her into understanding what she's doing to the whole family, so be it. Tough love it is then.
Still need to talk to L, but I want to bring it all in the open during custody hearing. Then let the social workers do their job, check us both out. At the same time, I'd like to offer to pay for her therapist and continue with a 50/50 arrangement as long as she's still seeing one, while the rest of the D goes forward.
The mother of my children needs help. My children need a mother. My end game is a healthy woman in my kids' lives. I don't care who she's with by then as long as she's healthy. What she has right now is not healthy. And from what I saw on OM's FB page he doesn't love her. At all.And she must know it.
One day she will understand that was love too.