I messed up

 I messed up my marriage. 

Possibly from the very start. 
And without doing so intentionally or knowing I was doing so. 

I was emotionally abusing my husband for years and seriously had no idea I was doing so. 

I have suffered from sexual, emotional, and mental abuse from family members and my husband was my safe space.

That meant that he also became my emotional punching bag unintentionally. 

I ended up hurting him in some of the same ways I had been hurt by people in my family who I should have been able to trust. 

I repeated the cycle, and I am not sure I will ever forgive myself for that. 

He is done. He wants to separate. To divorce me. To be done with me. To only be associated with me by coparenting. 

Of course this is never what I wanted. Never what I envisioned for myself. Definitely not something I ever expected when we adopted two of our girls this summer. Why would we do that if we were just going to tear apart our family?

I have dealt with so much frustration, sadness, and rejection of all of this. I have definitely been cycling through all of the stages of grief dealing with the grief of losing my marriage. 

We would have celebrated our 10 year wedding ceremony anniversary on November 17th. Instead, we spent it in the house on separate levels- me in the basement, him in the master suite, and barely talking. We went to our last family counseling session the next day and I realized that we will forever want different things and my efforts at getting him back are completely pointless. I am just hurting myself further by continuing to try. 

I have been in a relationship with an amazing partner who loves me so well and I fear all the time that I may do the same to him. How do I trust myself after hurting someone I love so much? 

Between Reactive Attachment Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder I feel like it will be an uphill battle to not hurt those around me. I struggle so much with wanting to isolate myself from everyone around me just to protect them from the monster I can be. 

I often hate myself for the pain I caused the man I loved the most in the world. I don't even know that he knows how much he truly means to me based on how terribly I must have been treating him. I had so many trauma responses that I used with him including masking that he felt was absolutely lying to him. In reality it was me trying to protect myself or those around me by making things seem normalized and okay when really on the inside I was falling apart but my trauma response made me want to mask and pretend all was well. He still feels that was lying outright to him. And while in the basic case it was, it was also so much more because it was never me intentionally lying to him. I would usually realize much later that I was not okay and by then it was too late or caused a big problem when I told him how I was actually feeling. It was always a mess and of my own doing. But a cycle I did not know how to break. 

These are things I am working so hard on now, but unfortunately it is way too little too late, and I cannot change it. I cannot fix it. All I can do is try to heal. I cannot fix my relationship with him. All I can do is work hard to coparent with him as best as I can for our children. I constantly feel like I fall short as a parent and like I am failing our girls. I completely fucked up our family unit and it will never be the same. I can see them hating these changes and there is nothing I can do to change it or make it better or take it back to normal. This is the new normal now. And I absolutely hate it. 

We are swapping up our coparenting schedule to where we each have the girls for a full week at a time. Other than events that we would both be present at this means we would literally go a whole week without seeing them. The thought of this really hurts me but I know I have to try. I went to visit with my partner and his dad in Ohio this week from Sunday-Wednesday night when we got back. I talked to the big girls 3 times on facetime or phone call while I was gone and each time, they talked about how much they missed me and wished I was home. That was only with me being gone 4 days. I can't imagine what 7 days at a time repeatedly is going to be like for us. I don't want to imagine it, but I know it is about to become reality. As much as a break from parenting can be nice, they are still my absolute world, and it kills me to be apart from them for so long and not be able to wrap my arms around them when they say they wish I could hug and kiss them or cuddle them. 

I am struggling. I so hope this gets easier. It really doesn't feel like it ever will.