Hello everyone!

I've got another crucial question, and thank any and all who want to contribute their perspective.

My husband and I have been married for a little over 10 years. We've always been challenged as a relationship, both because of our differing temperaments , attitudes toward money, and the fact that we have a child with special needs, who adds a high level of tension to our household because of the demanding nature of those needs.

During the course of our marriage, my husband has often talked of divorce, usually during conflict. However, I have always talked him down off of what I considered a "nuclear" option. We've done a lot of couples therapy, individual therapy, and weekend couples retreats. And I have personally been challenged to grow, which I believe I have.

In addition, I think that I never considered co-parenting my children with him separately... Frankly, I wasn't sure if I could do it, or if we could afford to part financially, and still be responsible for our children. In fact, our decision to be married was largely influenced by my becoming pregnant with our first child.

Suddenly, following yet another one of our epic blowouts where divorce was brought up, I am suddenly wondering if perhaps I am holding on for all of hte wrong reasons. What if I'm just scared, and used to doing with so little emotionally that I don't realize that, by staying together, we are actually having a detrimental effect on our children?

Maybe it would be better to co-parent our children apart?

Here are the questions I posed and resulting responses....

What is the right attitude toward saving this marriage for highest growth?
Hex 49 unchanging.

What is our potential for coparenting adequately apart?
Hex 37.2>9

What are my husband and my chances of coparenting our children supportively separately?
Hex 26.5>9

Feeling like leaving marriage is dodging responsibility...(There is a part of me that is so ready to be done with the drama!)
Hex 50.3.4>52

I am absolutely flummoxed. Either I need to shift my perspective (49) and by doing so, save the marriage (lots of small tending, and family as seen in hex 9 and 37), or I just need to let it go with love and respect, but definitely shed the marriage (49)


Help please!

Thanks as ever!

Susan

synthesis said:

What is our potential for co-parenting adequately apart?
Hex 37.2>9

Click to expand...

It looks like Yi is urging you not to take on any extra responsibilities at this time but rather stick to the familiar. I'm sorry your husband and you are having such a hard time, with a lot of arguing, but I don't think 49 is saying to shed the marriage. It could just as easily refer to a revolution in the way you view each other. Sounds like you two are coming from two different places, really, but such differences can be cured with a change in your perspective.

I'm very much with Ginny on this one. The succession of questions and answers spoke the same feeling and reasoning to me.

There is one thing I'll add to that. I was in a long and mutually increasingly unhappy 32 year marriage. I was a hard line believer in doing the right thing. Then one day someone said, about something unrelated, it's important not only to do the right thing but to do it for the right reasons.

That said, the readings emphasize in 9, the importance of carrying on daily actives, attention given to little ones, so it's important that regardless if you stay together or separate, that the children have two happy parents. Staying together for the sake of the kids is doing the right thing for the wrong reason. I speak from personal experience, so please consider my statement as being very biased, but candid.

Never in all those years did Yi agree for us to divorce, and I've must have asked a hundred times. But in retrospect, my interpretations were driven and biased by my conscience, my superego. A superior man does thus. etc.

Choose your poison, because neither alternative is pleasurable. That's why I still lean toward Ginnie's interpretation, and not give up hope, yet.

Ginnie and Meng, thank you. What you confirmed is also what I woke up this morning thinking. I think that I need to continue trying, Although my husband has some emotional hangups, he is a very good man, and loves his children very much. I know that he is committed to them, and he is committed to supporting me in mothering the kids.

What I need to stop doing is taking ownership of all of my husband's unhappiness. It is that which causes me the most misery.

Thank you again for your time.

synthesis said:

What I need to stop doing is taking ownership of all of my husband's unhappiness.

Click to expand...

Amen.

I think that's a great summation of this string of readings.