Quote:
Originally Posted by
newmomlearning 
Hi,
I'm sorry for your pain. You'd said that she was drinking heavily for a while due to her unhappiness adjusting to the new family life after the initial honeymoon. It seems to me that was possibly the "real" her. That is not a normal reaction to stress. Here are some words that helped me see my relationship with my husband was unworkable:
Drug/alchohol abuse is an attempt to escape from what is felt to be an untenable reality. It is believed that the escape is the solution but this is part of the illusion.
Any solution that is not based in reality is no real solution at all. When one member of a family retreats into this drug induced illusion it becomes impossible for the family to sustain itself in a healthy and life giving way. A link in the chain is sorely damaged. What is real can no longer be relied upon as common ground. Communication cannot make its way across the gulf between reality and the escape from that reality.
I would suggest that you not give away/lose your parental rights by letting her move to Atlanta. She can't move out-of-state without your consent. It could be that she will not adjust well to motherhood & you'll want to be watching that. Children need protection & a healthy parent can do that, an unhealthy one can not. Are you sure she's the type of woman you want to raise your son, solo?
P.S. I just want to add that doesn't all this seem a bit crazy to you?? You put forth a plan for moving in a few years, not drastically changing the vision you two had shared....but modifying it to suit her changing needs. She rejected that, abruptly. When there is a lot of crazyiness/things that don't jibe & make sense...pay attention. There is more going on that the words she is saying to you.
Your son will need you in his Life.
P.P.S. I wouldn't want to leave my young adult children either. It would be great if your wife could understand that & feel secure that you will move with her in a few years.
Yes - I do think this is crazy. I think this is the worst possible thing she could do. I mean, if she had had an affair, it would be far more manageable than this, as nutty as that may sound. You all need to understand that my wife and I talked for months at the beginning of this relationship about how important it was for me to maintain my residence in this town. The truth is that she always used to say that she knew by falling in love with me that we would most likely "be here forever" and that she was okay with that. And in all honestly, my response was always that I didn't think it would be fair for us to live here forever, and that at some point in the next five years or so, we could move wherever she wanted. But back then, the few times that came up, she never once mentioned Atlanta where her father and brother are. But she said it would be great to seek out some adventure in a new place where we knew nobody. It's also important to note, that almost five years ago, when we first started out, she had a job opportunity in Atlanta that came up. We'd only been gonig out for 2 months, but we were deeply in love. Still, she asked me what I thought she should do. At the time, I was looking at her becoming integrated into my family and how hard I knew that would be, and I also thought it would be too selfish of me to keep her from moving because she was from the south and she would be closer to her family. I knew that it must be hard to live life having lost a mother to suicide and I myself was coming out of a 6 year relationship and didn't think my head was clear enough to even know then if i should be in a new relationship. We slept on it, and in the morning I told her how much I loved her, and how much I would miss her, but that I thought she needed to take the job. She told me she felt the same way and then that night, she called me up crying, telling me how she lied and that she didn't want to leave our relationship, and she stayed.
I would be lying if I said that the concept of moving hasn't been implied or suggested in some capacity over the years, but all baby talk surrounded the basic concept that the new baby would have 3 loving sisters in his/her life.......the idea was that for the next few years, we would be here. We wouldn't leave with the baby anytime soon. I'm not a selfish jerk........yes, my entire circle of friends, my family, my kids and my career are all here.
But my kids' lives are here. Their mother lives here, their friends, etc. No, I don't have to live here with them forever. Again - I made a proposal that I think is both fair and sensitive to her needs and is a true compromise. Three years in exchange for the rest of our lives is a fair trade-off and nobody is going to convince me otherwise.
My concern with my wife is this..........she is abundantly intelligent, strong willed, organized, focused and generally capable of solving problems. But she also rushes to judgement, rushes into big decisions, and often ignores the fine print which has often blown up in her face. To me, this is no different than any other example in her life when she has been so focused on the next blip on the horizon that she completely ignores the danger right underneath her nose. While we have been off in many ways since that company made the Atlanta job offer to her back in February, at the same time we found out she was pregnant, we still functioned. But to me, the biggest thing that changed was that for the first time since her mother's suicide, she no longer had any escape. While I would never call her an alcoholic, I would say when she was blue and missing her Mom (which was very obvious both during our wedding as well as at the start of the pregnancy) she used to down a bottle of wine. This wasn't all the time, but it was more frequent after we became married. Once she became pregnant, she no longer had a chemical escape. She's had to face her new life and her mother's death without any form of escape. My primary concern is that she is fully depressed. She started seeing a counselor who more or less suggested that she'd made all these decisions (as far as marrying a man with 3 children; a man who'd been divorced previously; did all these wonderful things to earn our love even when it was not expected of her) for the wrong reasons, and this counselor more or less encouraged her to shake things up in her life and hence she moved. But I know my wife........she's often very selective in her story telling and I don't how much of what she told this counselor was true, honest, information. Have they explored the manifestations of losing a parent to suicide? Have they covered how my wife has often dived headlong into things and then found out that they weren't exactly as she planned before she pulls out with a change of heart? Have the covered what kind of message is sent to a child when a parent takes her life? That perhaps the message is when things get to tough, it's okay to throw in the towel?
I'm not expert on any of this. I do often wonder how the birth of our son will impact her. Will it help her? Will it change her focus? Will it make her even worse? I suppose only some of you can tell me your thoughts on that. Part of me has always believed that a child would help fill that void inside of her - help balance her out a bit more......and maybe then we can patch this back up. But I suppose the reality may be that it makes her even more depressed.
I don't know.
To answer all of you who are wondering why I haven't just packed my bags and left for Atlanta.......it's easy. My job isn't easily replaced.......there may be an opportunity down there and maybe it will pay well and maybe it won't. My kids ARE here, and my daughter goes to college relatively close by. She starts there in about a month. My youngest daughter is having some major issues adapting to being a responsible young lady, and I'm trying to work with her and help her get on track. If I left now, I would truly feel as though I were abandoning an opportunity to help her evolve to the next level. My oldest daughter is about to finish nursing school and has my grandson. Again - in 3 years, it's a much different landscape.
I've given this a lot of thought and I agree there's no way I could never have a reltionship with my son. He will need me and I will need him. I suppose after I move this weekend I will focus on finding a lawyer and at least educating myself on my options. I don't know that she can just leave state like this even if she does have the baby in atlanta. I think I should have an opportunity to have that relationship here, as per the plan.
Can any of you give me any thoughts about how pregnancy made you do some irrational things and how that changed after the baby was born? Given how sudden this is and how quickly she just closed the door on my daughters and my mother (again - she built solid, loving relationships with all of them) and asked not to see any of them given her concern over weakened resolve, I just have to wonder if she isn't just totally unstable mentally right now.
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