Thank you all!
Downwhim (cool name by the way!) I am trying... .it's amazingly important for me to remind myself there is a reason he's doing this. Well, at least all his cleaning will make the house easier to sell I guess. And amazingly hard to see him do something that earned me many an uproar from him when I brought up the possibility of doing it while I was living there!
Vortex, this line,
Since finding this site, I have been able to clearly identify the pattern of me being unhappy and him doing just enough to shut me and get me to relax only to repeat the cycle all over again.
really hits home. My uBPDh may have done that in the more distant past, but the last decade just kept going downhill to where I was just grateful if he left me alone. To my h, the fact that I was unhappy wasn't his problem at all, that was just me not understanding him. My needs got lower and lower on his priorities and everything became more and more my fault.
Also this:
They do it because they think they can suck us in so that they can go back to their comfort zone.
IMPORTANT to remember! It's about them and their comfort zone, not ours. Such a great point.
And yes I shall turtle my way through this!
Mutt, I gotta love a logical, mathematical person. Especially since i'm all made of feelings and senses. When you see the details laid out like that, he's a horse I wouldn't bet on!
I hadn't deleted the photo, I wondered if I should. I have to admit to being fascinated, not having seen that part of the floor in a decade.
Slowly I'm beginning to see that I can detach from him without any other relationships being caught up in that--sure, all our lives are effected, holidays will change because it's pretty awkward for me when we're all together. But my relationships with each person are separate things, I just used to try to bring him into those relationships but he never made much of an effort.
I just remembered a time when I was cleaning and organizing in the attic and I came across some of the decorations from a party i'd done for his 50th birthday. So I strung the lights up on the balcony and put up decorations and invited him out there for dinner and wine. He was so excited I had done that, he said something about how much he liked seeing my old self again, which was commentary on the fact that I hadn't been as caretaking of HIM since I had fibromyalgia! From here I see what a selfish take that was on me being ill and struggling to take care of myself, it had taken away from me taking care of HIM! And in the past couple of years I couldn't even talk about fibromyalgia or it would set him off into trying to make me feel guilty!
So one small piece of clean floor cannot a marriage make.
Again, thanks all!
