There haven't been any more frequent father miles added in the past 3+ weeks, but the tickets are already purchased for the next two trips, one in mid-September and one in early November. Six short days spread over two visits--that's all I'm going to get with my kids until Christmas, as this is their mother gets them for Thanksgiving in odd-numbered years. The mere fact that I have already purchased the tickets and made hotel and rental car reservations is a sign of progress. In the past, my anxiety has been such that I haven't been able to commit myself to buying the tickets until it's often too late. The result of my procrastination has typically been that plane tickets get so expensive that I have to do some creative travel gymnastics, like taking overnight buses or trains, or flying back home at 5:45 a.m. on Monday morning. Thankfully there won't be any of those this time around.
As with last August my wife decamped for two weeks in Atlanta with her daughter; they arrive back in Virginia in about two hours. I'm not sure exactly why they need to make this trip. On the surface, it's for my stepdaughter to spend time with her mostly useless father, but all he's able to spare for her is a few hours on Tuesday and Sunday afternoons. Even though my wife has gone as far as to offer him use of our house and car for a few days if he comes to visit here, he has never come up to see his daughter, and I'm sure he never will. When I think of all I do to maintain my relationship with my kids it makes me viscerally angry at the guy for not giving two sheep about his daughter. I guess he'll pay for that when she grows up and hates his guts.
So why is she there if not for that? She says it's so her family can see her daughter, but we were just there for a week two months ago. Then she says it's because her mom and aunt are getting older and sicker, but: 1) they don't seem any different to me; and 2) they could come to visit us here, as they both have all the free time in the world. In truth it's just that, at 39, she still doesn't see herself as a grown-up, because her mother and three older sisters will always treat her as such. She simply can't live her own adult life independent of her family.
She proved that fact in spades during her time away. The first day she was gone, she told me that she had registered a positive pregnancy test. She had already been pregnant twice before since we've been back together, with both ending in miscarriages within 8 weeks. In both instances she had, against my wishes, gone and told her whole family, thus creating expectations. My thinking has always been to not tell anyone until after the first trimester, lest there be an issue. The fact that it had happened twice before, I think, validates my point of view. Anyhow, there it was. She tested positive, I told her not to tell anyone, and she said OK.
A few days later we were talking about it, and she was telling me that she was feeling very tired and nauseous, and was "worried" about what her family would think. I told her that it really wasn't their beeswax, as people are allowed to get sick. I could tell in her voice what was really going on--she had obviously spilled the beans. I asked her about it and she said that, yes, she had told her mother. She then went on to say that she had already told her mother several days earlier, and had lied to me when I had asked her if she had told anyone. Apparently her mother found out before I did; she screamed in the bathroom after testing positive, and her mother asked if she was OK, so she told her the news.
No big deal, right? Her mother inadvertently found out, and that should have been that. But, no, she had to lie to me about where things stood. As I see it, she decided to protect her mother, rather than our marriage. Up until this point I was actually doing OK during my time alone--I was certainly doing better than my two weeks alone last August when I ended up in the ER and almost checked myself into the psych ward. But then, what? My wife had just clearly demonstrated to me that our marriage did not and would never come first to her, that her relationship with her own family would always take precedence.
I have been alone with this thought eating away at me for the past week, and it has sent me back into a depression. Aside from going to work, taking a bike ride with a childhood friend, and my daily phone calls to my kids, I have had no contact with anyone else in the past week. I haven't attempted to make any plans with anyone, and I've mostly just moped around the house. I have spoken very infrequently on the phone to my wife, and have told her that she is on notice--one more lie or betrayal of my trust, and I'll be serving her with divorce papers.
I'm not sure if I mean that or not, but I think I do. I have come to the realization that, for all of my defiance about not wanting to ever go back to Maine, my marriage enables me to go on living away from my kids. Having a house, a wife, a stepdaughter, and an extended family, gives me something to hang on to. During my time alone I have thought a lot about what I would even do if I really did get divorced, and it has become clear that I would have to go back to Maine. If I'm going to be on my own, then why should I pretend that it's OK to be so far from my kids? Part of the reason why we settled on Virginia, as opposed to further north, is that it's an awful lot closer to Atlanta than is Maine.
Oh, and it turned out she wasn't actually pregnant; she had something called a "chemical pregnancy," in which the egg gets fertilized but never implants. When my wife told me this, I asked her, "well, now, don't you feel silly for telling your mother?" She did. I hope her mother didn't start knitting any baby blankets in the intervening week.
So we are going to go see a counselor. I will tell the counselor that I feel like my wife is, and always will be married to her birth family. My wife will tell the counselor that she recognizes that, and that she is going to make some changes. We will get on with our lives, and then the next time her family breathes on her, she will stand at attention, just like always. I know she loves me and part of her wants to truly embrace our marriage, but I just don't think she's capable of drawing real boundaries with her family. At some point I am either going to have to just accept that I love her most of the time, in spite of her shortcomings, or say enough is enough, pack up my life, and start all over again, again.
None of this has much to do with being a long-distance parent, I guess, but it all certainly adds more unwanted stress and drama to my already overstressed and overdramatized existence. At least I am not fixated on my ex-wife for once, which is a good thing. Onward...
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