Yeah I wonder what the first conversation ebtween Girl C and the guy taht use4d to abuse her sounded like: “hey I just called to say I was a jerk and i was wrong, I should never have treated you like that, can we have lunch?”
Hey I don’t want to be too hard on you. You must be pretty miserable now but, you really have to grow up for your children’s sake. If you had to make all those decisions over again but with your children’s happiness and welfare as the priority rather than your own (recognizing that a miserably unhappy dad is not good for the kids either), would you have still made those same decisions?
If I may ask, which woman made love the best, and/or, who had the nicest vagina?
So that we can tell him things like this:
I posted in the pit because I knew there would be a good handful of folks coming along to tell me how stupid I am or that it’s all my fault anyways. Not that I give a shit what they think of me, but still…
I am growing up. It’s not easy, but for the sake of my children and myself I am doing it. I have been doing it for years. I look at who I was 10 years ago and am agog that I had children.
I honestly thought, once I had made the decision to be with just my current wife, that that was it. I was going to dedicate the rest of my life to growing and being a good husband and a good father.
And up until a year ago, I thought I was doing that. I had a job, boring but stable with room to grow. A stable monogamous relationship with a woman I adored, who I thought loved me too. I even get along ok with my ex-wife.
But my wife grew more and more unhappy, until this. I am gobsmacked, still, 9 months later. I am horrified, and terrified. I am filled with rage and disgust at my wife, and self loathing for knowing how weak I am that I would still consider taking her back after all this.
My life as I thought it was is ruined.
So those of you talking about how I wanted this, and how messed up I am for trying to stabilize the chaos that was my life before, thanks for the caring words. Very helpful.
Ha! Perusing the thread for the first time this was my initial thought, and someone beat me to it almost a week ago.
Tristan, I feel for you because I know something of what you’re going through. I can’t say I know the whole nine yards because I never let her get involved with me the way you did but I know what it’s like to fall in love with someone who’s bi-polar. And make no mistake, that’s what’s happened to you.
In my case we’ve known each other since we were both kids, (I’ll call her ‘S’ for convenience and privacy’s sake), S was slightly older than me, she was 12 and I was 10 at the time. Throughout our teenage years I harbored a crush that was unhealthy even though, and I didn’t know it at the time, reciprocated. She wound up making some really bad decisions with her life while I didn’t, (which I partly blame myself for, even though I know I shouldn’t) and it drove us apart as friends. Fast forward a handful of years and we’re both in our early to mid twenties. In an act of weakness and desperation I told her about my crush and the fact that I still harbor feelings for her. S hits me with a bunch of shit about how her life could have been different if I had just been honest with her in the beginning. Factually, I think she’s probably right but I can’t deal with the fact that I think she she’s blaming me for the bad decisions she’s made in her past, when I wasn’t even around. At this point S has four kids by three different men, none of whom are me, and though it grates against my better judgment I re-enter her life to help her to deal with her issues and it quickly goes downhill.
Not only is she bi-polar but she has particularly acute physical problems as well, (her doctors have told her she probably can’t hold down a regular job due to her physical condition, and have recommended disability for her), and she has problems paying her bills. I’ve tried periodically to help her out but if I can’t it becomes a failing on my part. I’m supposed to be her ‘friend’, regardless of the circumstances that actually exist between us, and it’s led to some real fights because I won’t relent. (Beware the word ‘friend’ in my experience. It becomes code for something else entirely.)
I know S loves me legitimately in her own way, but expectations become something that can’t be ignored. We’ve never been together seriously, (and unlike yourself I have no children with her or anyone else and we’ve only drifted in an out of each other’s live the last six or seven years), but somehow I’ve become the yardstick against which she measures the male half the species. We blew up at each other again a week and a half ago and, according the last voice message she left on my phone, I convinced her that men “are selfish and ain’t about shit”, (her exact words).
But you want to know the worst part? i still love her and I want to see her well and healthy. Even when I know I’m not thinking rationally about the situation I want to know that she’s okay. I was fortunate enough to realize when I was on the brink of making a bad decision with this woman and pulled back. And I know what it is to love to someone who’s bi-polar. (When it’s good it’s really good, and you want them to feel like that like that forever. But the down times happen as well, and as much as you might want to, you can’t control or influence it.)
I don’t to hijack your thread Tristan, so I’ll end it here. But just know you’re not alone and others have went through both worse and better, and reading your thread I think “but for the grace of god”, even though I don’t believe in god and it’s mostly a figure of speech. 
If not for a few well placed moments I could be walking in your shoes right now.
You could absolutely say no to her and you know it
Don’t worry, there’s more fish in the sea
Well you fucked up. A lot. And if that is the sum total of your life, yeah, it was all a waste. But there is probably more to your life than all that bad stuff. I want to give you some encouraging words, but when you say you’ll take the lying, cheating bitch back, then it sounds like you haven’t learned your lesson yet. So keep kicking yourself in the ass until you stop feeling sorry for yourself.
Wait – I thought you left C to be with A? 
(Maybe you should make up fake names for them, rather than “Girl C” and “Girl A”?)
Program accepted, and running.
It’s hard to get past remembering what thing were like when it was good, you know?
But yes, you are absolutely right. If she’s this fucked up, even if she changed her mind, and I was stupid enough to take her back, it would only last until the next “better” thing came along from her past.
Done.
Moving on.
If you wanted “helpful” instead of people telling you you’ve been and possibly continue to be an idiot, you should have posted in MPSIMS. Then you could have gotten nothing but “Aw poor baby” sympathy and perhaps some constructive advice.
Like I said, I don’t want to be too hard on you because you seem to realize you’ve made some stupid decisions but you’re like some tragic character that seems intent on making the same mistake over and over again and i am saying that if you shift your focus to your kids, you might be able to make objectively better decisions.
Dude, your life isn’t “over.”
You have kids. That is your life. This matters more than your ex-girlfriend, ex-wife, hot girl down the block, or whatever. You have kids. You need to be there, 100% there. You need to walk away from this drama, stop living in the moment-to-moment, and stop making the focus of your life whatever sex/ego-boost/whatever you are getting from these women. You are a daddy, so start acting like one and not a high school drama queen. None of this shit matters. Your kids matter. Be there for them.
This is really good advice. You say that you and your oldest son are going to move to California, but what about the youngest son? How old is he, and how often are you going to be able to see him if you do that? Are you going to be able to be a part of his life?
From what I can tell, he’s got children on both sides of the continent at this point. Somebody’s getting screwed either way.
My last advice…go watch an episode of Intervention. You can find it on Hulu or on a number of other sites. You really only need to watch one episode, because the stories are all the same.- kid gets born, parents give sex/booze/drugs/dating/abuse/work/mental illness more attention than they give their kids, kid grows up, self-medicates, and becomes a broke-down druggie.
I like you Tristan, I really do. But all this business of flitting back and forth across the country based on your romantic whims, uprooting or abandoning the kids like so much baggage, bringing a full-on love triangle into your kids’ home…it’s not cool, man.
Don’t drag your oldest son out there until you have a place to live and a job.
Jesus fucking christ.
Agree with Misnomer’s sentiment here.
I see no compelling reason to move, and the sentiment, “I have nothing here” proves that you still have some growing up to do. Dude, you have kids and a job where you are. Just fucking stay put for a few years and bring some stability and logic to the kids’ lives.
Quoted for truth.
^ This.
+1.
Concur, agree, etc. etc.
OP, every time you start to think things like, “My life is over!” or “I have nothing here anymore!” stare at yourself in the mirror, and remind yourself: you have kids here, and you have a job here. That’s a LOT of “here” here.
This x1000. I see quite a few stories like this on the SDMB, where two parents are lying, cheating, and/or snooping on each other, and their kids are simply caught in the middle. I should know… I grew up this way. In the words of my father twenty-something years ago: “We’re going to do what we [the parents] like, and the kids can go fuck themselves.”
Also, this is some pretty strong evidence as to why polyamory is never a good idea.