SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

I am really struggling. It's been almost a year and half since DDay and the rollercoaster is killing me. Now that I have decided to see the lawyer in January, I feel like I have an end in sight, but it still feels so far away. And I'm still so sad all the time. I'm starting to be afraid that I'll always be sad and angry, and that it will never get better. Its really affecting my ability to function. But I don't know what else to do... I feel like I'm just barely surviving. It doesn't help that one of my daughters is a senior and planning on attending college out of state next year which makes me super sad. My other daughter is 13 and has been mean as a snake lately to all of us. I just feel like my whole life is a train wreck.

AdLarue17,
You have been heard. And I am sorry you are going through this pain.

Happy to hear you are seeing a lawyer in January (see a few if you haven’t chosen one already - find one that will make sure you get everything you are entitled to). It will be good to be taking control when right now it feels like everything is changing and you can’t control any of it.

I understand the fear of more loss or change. I went through that too, and my therapist helped me see that I made it through the infidelity shitshow and I will get through whatever else life has in store for me. We are all so strong. So try to lean into the excitement that your daughter will be heading to college in 8 months - that means you have done a great job as a parent!

as for the 13 year old— well, I was the stereotypical unpleasant teen at that age and there wasn’t any A stressors in my life. It’s a phase (albeit a not fun one) and she’ll come out of it.

So it sounds like you have two great, normal teens in your house who are doing typical teen things.

Are you in IC? It might help you manage all these changes.

Be proud of yourself. You are doing great work parenting and you are taking steps to get yourself out of infidelity. You may not feel like it, but you look like a rockstar to me!

(((AdLarue17))) Of course you feel this way. And your children no doubt are reacting to the situation in the way teens do.

I remember my own teen years when I couldn't WAIT to launch myself into a new life, since I knew my mother had been just biding her time until we graduated - she told me that when I was 14! My father had a drinking problem and the NPD that fed it.

My late brother's oldest daughter, who witnessed the most of her father's alcoholic temperament (my brothers followed their Dad), went from a sweet, straight A junior high school student to a rebel 13 year old after making some new friends my brother and wife didn't approve of, and she caused her parents a lot of stress and family counseling before she geographically distanced herself from the rest of her siblings. That was several years before my former SIL took off.

Children feel the divide and I think it makes them feel unsteady or something. I know I didn't have much of any expectation for a continued family "to come home to" if my college choices didn't work out! Unfortunately, my mother eventually chose to bail out of her hell by jumping from the frying pan into the fire. She had a job she was building into a career, but turned down a promotion and transfer to her home town, to run off and elope with another alcoholic, when I was about 23. He had 4 grade school kids she became instant stepmother to, and she quit her new career to be their mom which in many ways closed the door on us getting too close to them, for the rest of her life. I think my late siblings would agree we would have preferred her to stay a single mom, OUR mom, and not cast us aside, as it were. She chose a whole 'new beginning' that didn't include us, at least as "dependents." Of course, I was a young adult by then, but my brothers and sister were just in high school. (FWIW, we stayed in her "outer circle" and she continued to share what love she could. Most of us visited her, but meantime all of us married super young. And all of us later divorced!)

Just feeling very sympathetic to your situation and want to say: keep to your course, get to a stable situation and your feelings should improve a lot. And when the children sense that, it should help them mellow out.