She is allowed to pick her own clothes. In this instance, she wanted to wear dress shoes to ride her bike.
Thank you. Means a lot to me, because I feel like a failure. I tried, I really did. I wasn’t perfect - I lost my temper or sulked sometimes when I thought I was unnecessarily taking a back seat. As you said, she already second-guesses herself and is saddled with tons of guilt, and I didn’t make that any easier. I just feel awful. I can’t stop replaying our relationship over in my head. Maybe if I could take back some of those things she wouldn’t have given up on me. I had a dream last night that we got back together and it was the first time the pain stopped, albeit briefly.
Sorry for the LiveJournal bullshit. I just have nobody to talk to.
I don’t know. It does sound like a particularly difficult situation.
I’ve never been a single parent. Considering all the difficulties of parenting as a team, my hat’s off to those who are doing it alone. I work three evenings a week, and I know how much harder it is for my wife to have to deal with them those days. There is just something about having another person to spell you off which really helps.
That said, kids really do need limits, and also a lot of love. I’ve become almost a “surrogate” parent to some of my really young students as their parents go through divorces. It take more than just a firm hand, it really takes a lot of commitment.
My seven-year-old just had a “close to” melt-down tonight at a restaurant because her nine-year-old friend got to have something which our family doesn’t do. That stuff just happens. I can’t imagine how much more difficult it would be do deal with that if my wife and I weren’t on the same page. Yes, we handle things radically differently, but we respect each others’ approach.
OP, I hope you can stop beating yourself up pretty soon. I really don’t think there was some answer that you missed. Once she gave you the “you don’t have kids so you just don’t understand” dismissal, that would have been the “ok we’re done here” signal for me, so the fact that you tried to soldier on after that was going above and beyond, in my opinion. I hope you do something fun this weekend, and feel better soon.
There is very little of your situation that I can personally relate to, but this is definitely one of them.
When the love of my life (at the time) left me, the worst thing in the world were the dreams. I would loathe sleeping because I knew that I was going to dream that she took me back and in the dream I felt such joy and happiness, just to wake up and have my mood crash again. This happened (literally) for years).
Like everything else in life…it gets better. You did what you could, man.