lostsoulmate Posted January 12, 2009 Posted January 12, 2009 Background: I am 30, living with my daughter's father for 6 years, we have been engaged for 2 years. We own a house, live a quite life. I have recently figured out I have a big problem. I am not happy here with him. My family (all my extended family even) live about 14 hours ago by car. I moved to my current place looking for work and was running from a relationship. I met my fiance 4 months after living here. He was the first person I met, outside of work. We had been together for 6 months when I found out I was going to have our daughter. I FREAKED! I am 14 hours from my family, living with a man I really didn't know. I decided that I wanted my daughter to have a life I never had. A stable home with a mom and a dad that live together. I wanted it so badly for her. More Background: Over the past two years my fiance and I have had some rough times. Feb '07 his 61 year old mother (he is an only child. They had him very late in their lives) had back surgery. She was to come home in 5 days she didn't wake up for 5 days and she didn't get out of the hospital for 16 weeks. Then she was still very sick at home. I get a new job April '07. Two months go by and she is back in the hospital for open heart surgery July '07. She recovers and is doing well at home. Aug '07 I collapse at a race track north of where we live. I have to have surgery on my gall bladder, they say I am lucky to be alive. At the same time they tell me I am pregnant. YIKES! They do not want to wait to do surgery as my gall bladder is that bad. I say yes to the surgery, but ask about what it will do the the baby. They can not give me any answers because they usually don't do surgery during the 1st trimester. I end up terminating the pregnancy on Sept '07. My fiance and I weren't sure what to do about the complications that could/would happen from the surgery. We made a decision, I am OK with it. Things are as good as can be expected. We are making it through. So I thought. April '08 I go back home to see my little bro finally graduate from College. My crazy mother (More Background: My mother mentally and phyiscally abused me and my bro until I turned 14 and my father got custody of us. I have seen and been around things and people "normal" people only see on TV) came with meo n the 14 hour trip. She is abusing her meds and is passed out most of the time. It's better than her trying to get me to think I am crazy.Two weeks after the trip my mom calls me (she lives out on the east coast) and tells me she thinks I need to get home right now. Something bad in happpening to my daughter (I had just left for my once a week "Girls night out"). I told her to shut up and left it at that. She called the next day and told me my fiance has "hit" on her (she has only been to my house 5 times in 6 years.) For six months I don't speak to her. She accused my fiance of doing "something" to my daughter and that he made sexual advances toward her. My great aunts passes away fall of '08 I decide to try and talk to my mother, realizing that life it too short. Nov 10th 2008, I go to my soon-to-be in-laws house to drop off my daughter (my soon-to-be mother-in-law) is going to babysit for a few hours. I find her on the kitchen floor, barely breathing. I call 911. She doesn't make it. WORST DAY OF MY LIFE! I AM A DIFFERENT PERSON NOW. WATCHING SOMEONE FIGHT FOR LIFE HAS CHANGED ME! I try to carry on, for my fiance and his father, my daughter. I know this is not the right time to explain how much I want to move home and be closer to my family. I know it's not the right time to tell him, but going through his mother's passing only made me want my family more. Fast forward to now: I had to go home (my step-mother almost bleed to death, my 83 year old grandpa is in the hospital (diabetes) and his wife, my grandma is being flown to a bigger town to have open heart surgery) over the New Year's holiday. I ended up at my ex's house. I stayed there and knew what I was doing was wrong. I still love him. I still think he is my soul mate. I let this lie I am living go on too long. Now I am a cheater! I am horrible. Why didn't I end it sooner? I looked for the right time to talk to my fiance. Then as I was driving back to my charade I realized there would never be a "right" time. I talked to my fiance the other night. Told him I wasn't happy. Told him I was going to be selfish, and I wanted to move home. He told me I should just be happy being with him and he will not move there. He is scared of moving there and then ending up where I am, NOT HAPPY. Our daughter is so young, do I stay and teach her the wrong way to love, stuck it up and live a lie? Do I leave, move home and teach her the broken home way of life that I of course know all too well? Either way I am still a cheater and it makes me feel, nothing... I have become a stone wall.
Eyeofthoth Posted January 12, 2009 Posted January 12, 2009 Hmmm . . . First of all I'm sorry for all you've gone through, because that does suck. It's all quite hard. I can relate a bit to your situation as I moved to the West Coast with a man I married leaving all my extended and very loving family on the East Coast and then (after 15 years) the H and I split up and I just wanted to go back home . . . but I wouldn't because my children live here and so does their father. Which leads me to think there are some things you have not considered: 1) Are you aware that if you move away from your daughter's father, your daughter will most likely be put into a situation of split custody, moving between two places that are 14 hours apart? From what I have seen, this is the very worst possible custody arrangement for children, and she will suffer from this; 2) With respect to your ex, did you sleep with him or did you just stay with him and realize you still love him? If you slept with him, then you have a guilty conscience to deal with and that sucks, but with respect to realizing you still love him, then I would strongly urge you to put your head in front of your heart and think about this: Whether you love him or not is not the issue, the issue is whether or not you had a positive relationship with him. Obviously you didn't, at least not in the end. It was negative enough for you to lose sight of loving him and to want to leave him. Focussing now on the fact that you still love him and allowing those feeling back into your consciousness is nothing but a result of the fact that you are trying to run away from your current relationship. You may need to do a lot of reality checking and refocussing of your mind to get over those reemerging feelings of love, and they might never completely go away, but so what? That is not the issue. The issue is whether or not your current relationship is viable or has had the life irretrievably crushed out of it. More likely you are going through a bad patch where you want to run away, but if you do, you will later come to regret that decision and remember how you loved him too. Unless of course, you never loved him and never could. It sounds as though your love with him had some big challenges thrown in the way early, which does not mean that it can't still grow now, but you would have to want to work on growing it together; 3) With respect to wanting to move back "home," I understand, I really do. But your mother sounds like a destructive influence and this really is worth thinking long and hard about. Also, it sounds as though perhaps you want to move back because you have not taken the time and made the effort to cultivate friendships where you are. We all need friendships outside of our primary love relationship and our families of origin, and maybe this is what you really need to focus on to fill in what is missing there. I hope these observations help.
Author lostsoulmate Posted January 12, 2009 Author Posted January 12, 2009 1. I have also thought of the consequences that would affect my daughter (who is 4) if I go home. It makes my stomach hurt. Her father and I would miss important parts of her life. We would perhaps introduce her to different ways of life. (My blended family is Native American, which very important to me. My fiance uses derogatory terms about different ethic people, and I don't blame him because I know it's a learned behavior.) I want her to be able to choose when she is old enough (I never had that opportunity), if that is what happens with this story. I also know that if I go home she would actually have family. Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, cousins. She would never have that here even if I stay (my fiance is an only child, only his father survives). If I stay she really wouldn't ever know them. All my extended family live 14 hours from where I am. If I move there she and I would have their support and love. 2. Not the issue. It took me being there with him to realize I am living a lie. I realized as I sat there and talked to him, I was "me". Where had I been? I couldn't remember the last time I talked about something that interested "me". He asked about things that he knew I liked. He knows "me". I have been someone else to try and fit with my fiance and this lie I am living. I know I love my fiance. But I am not in love with him. I love him for he is the man who helped my create my daughter. He is an incredible father. He loves her so much. Again, my stomach hurts, my whole body hurts when I realized I should have be honest with myself from the beginning. I should have told him I didn't want to raise my family so far away from my family. I have wasted 6 years, and now... again I am stone cold. I can't cry, I just stare ahead. 3. If I moved home, my mother would be over 2,000 miles away. Which is a good thing. As of late, today I mean, she has called both my bro and I and told us she was getting on a bus and then... she hoped she would see us again maybe someday. So moving home, would get me farther from her.
Author lostsoulmate Posted January 13, 2009 Author Posted January 13, 2009 What a difference a day makes. I wish, still at the crossroads. My fiance doesn't want me to stay and be unhappy. He says that would be a bad situation for our daughter to live in. I agree. Moving now doesn't seem like a good idea. Bad economy, no jobs... How do I keep pretending everything is ok? Should I? Do I move into the spare bedroom? What would that do to my daughter? Has anyone ever been in this type of situation before that can offer some help?
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