Thread: he just left

Hi Jacun

I very much feel for your situation. It is hard enough to go through a marriage break up without also having to cope with a pregnancy and up comming birth.

I think all of the feelings you are having are very normal given your situation.

He appears to be having a second teenagehood which is something I have observed with many of my friends ex partners, including my own, once they are seperated. He seems to want to throw off all family responsibilities now he is 'single'. this is not ok and he needs to be clearly told this. His children are still his children, even your unborn child, and he needs to be taking more responsibility.

He may feel that moving back to the family home after your c section is a bad idea as he may see it as a step towards reconciliation. However he still needs to provide emotional and practicle support to you and the children at this time. After all you didn't get pregnant by your self.

I understand your feelings of loneliness. In my situation I was the one who left but the loneliness was still very difficult. You would have had an image of what the rest of your life would look like and this image has now changed. This is a huge adjustment time for you.

I feel you should surround yourself with the people who love you and don't be afraid to ask for help.

It is also very early days yet, only three weeks. So who knows what the future holds. You weren't very clear about the circumstances leading up to your seperation so I'm not sure but reconciliation may still be a real option.

Do you think he would be open to the two of you attending counselling. It may help to work through the problems and even if it doesn't result in the two of you getting back together it may help you to have more of an understanding and also work through the issues of how to both support and care for your children together.

It sounds like he is walking away from a of a lot and I would be very surprised if he didn't live to regret it.

Try and focus your energies on your beautiful children and I promise you things will get better in time, what ever the outcome.

You may be going through normal stages of grief. They start with a feeling of numbness, like none of this is real. followed by sadness, anger and then acceptence. this is very normal and part of the heeling, although it feels so terrible while you are going through it and the amount of time it takes varries for all.

If it helps to use this forum to talk about what is going on and get advise I am glad.

I will check in again in a few days and see how you are going.

My thoughts are with you.

tt

I am very sorry to hear this. Whatever his problems are, he has no right to walk out on his wife and children.

Thanks for the feedback. Here is a little history of us. About once a year for as long as I have known him he goes through something like this. He wants to be a fighter, and everytime he has attempted it he fails. He blames me for this because I will ask him to hang out with us if he is away too much. He will get injured as most fighters will and he will quit. This is where he blames me: he says he only quit b/c I wanted to be with him. So then a year goes by and this pattern will repeat. I have it written in my journal since 2000.
Anyway 2 yrs ago when he did this our daughters especially the older one took the brunt of the impact. She was devastated to see this going on. After he was gone for 2 days he came back and said he would never do that again. Which really made me happy b/c it hurts before and after he leaves. So around Christmas of 06 I bought him this computer game that he had been wanting, World of Warcraft. He has an addictive personality and slowly began to spend all of his time downstairs playing. I tried really hard to not let it get as bad as it did. I would suggest a schedule because he didn't realize that he would be down there 8-10 hours a day. The schedule would work for a week and things would return to normal. On the weekends when I have school the girls would tell me that he would grab some food and go down there and they wouldn't really see him. They would cry when I got home from being bored all day. He didn't notice though.
Even with all of this I didn't notice that things were awful. I just thought well what can I complain about. So a couple of months ago I noticed I was begging him to fall asleep with me. Or watch a tv show with me and it was like a hard job for him. He would wake up and run down there before work and right after work. That was sort of out of character so my ears perked up. Then I noticed that he was talking on the phone on the patio. And when I asked what he was doing he said it was just fresh out there. The dogs go to the bathroom outthere so I know its not all that fresh.
In all the years we have been together I have never checked his phone but I started to. The logs were all deleted. Not like him at all. So I looked online and found that he was spending a lot of time talking to someone in another state. And when I asked about it he admitted that he had met someone on the game. And that she understands him like I don't. He said I am always too emotional: which is very true right now. He had told me that he would wait two years to leave so I could graduate from school and take care of our kids. And I went to my car to cry because I didn't want to wake up the girls but it was one of those cries that hits you so hard you end up choking and throwing up. He saw all this and said I'm not going I can't leave you. The next morning as he was getting ready for work he just seemed different. I knew he was going to take back those words.
And so later on in the day he called me and said to have his things ready he wasn't coming home at all. That was on a wednesday, he insisted on telling the girls but I had him hold off two days so they could enjoy the last days of school. And he told them on Friday. His explanation is that he feels suffacated that there are things he wants to do with his life: like fighting: that he can't do. He said he wasn't happy and this was going to make him feel better.
The girls took it hard and so now he is visiting everyday but he spends the first hours sleeping. He will play with them for a few min. Talk with me some, sleep with me (which I have just figured out is a huge mistake for my emotions) and then he is off. Like he has done something great for the day. Every night morning and mid day they get this look on their faces. It hurts me more to see that on them than the pain I feel.
Like I said he is high and drunk now most days. I don't know if it is his way of coping or what but he just isn't himself. His family is supporting him saying he has tried his best. But they are very disfunctional. The dad is an alcoholic, the mom is very posessive of her kids. Three out of four are living at home now and she is trying to get the fourth back. I think he may be bi polar or at the least extrememly depressed.
I hate watching him destroy his self. It's like as long as he was here I was able to keep him out of his family patterns. Which may be a huge part of the problem.
Not to blame everything on him I have my issues. And abandonment is a huge one of them. And I am too clingy to him. I probably have contributed to his lack of ambition but at the same time I have always told him to go out and do what he wanted. And this last time when he was blaming me for his fighting I did tell him you aren't happy and you need to see that I am not the cause of it. I told him to consider doing something different, I guess I opened the door for him to leave and he did.
I wouldn't say we have had the worlds greatest marriage but it wasn't that bad. At the bottom of everything we sincerely love one another. And we have a great family. A lot of people were envious of us and now I feel like everyday was a joke. Anyway that is a longer version of what is going on.