My wife is currently in China on holidays. She is with my son. She has gone with my blessing and my support.
It is a positive thing, given what we have just gone through recently. The fact that I agreed for my child to go oversease to a country like China without my presence, indicates something positive in an otherwise gloomy recent past.
What I mean by this should become very clear soon.
I guess it is at this point where I declare that we are in fact separated.
Anyway, it has been a very difficult last few months.
I guess you never really know someone unless you actually separate from them, and witness their reaction.
Our separation has for the most part been amicable, given the complex financial circumstances we were in.
I had come to the conclusion that our relationship simply would not work, and I realised that the longer I waited, the more vulnerable I would be to exploitation.
The fact that we just made a huge investment in a large house, although at first I thought to be a stabilising influence, made determining the genuine status of our relationship all the more urgent.
So it was I who separated from her.
Although I had planned to do this for a few weeks, when I finally did do it it was the result of a misundertanding on my part regarding a phone call she received.
I did not say anything but I assumed the worst, only to find out days later that it was an error on my part. It seemed I had grown weary and paranoid.
In any case, it didn't really matter. I did what I had to do, being the inevitable consequence of unresolved issues from our past.
The good thing is that during this period of separation, I have cleanly untangled my finances from hers, and managed to get a full account of her own net worth.
Wow!! I can't believe how much money she saved during our marriage, while I was paying for all her expenses.
Anyway, being separated, especially being the initiator of separation, gave me a strange sense of control. This is something that I had very little of for the bulk of our marriage.
I was able to request that she provide her true financial circumstances to me, as I did to her, in order to try and arrange an equitable financial agreement between us.
I was also able to make requests of my son's time, that were previously never afforded to me, regardless of how reasonable and just my requests may have been.
I asked for my son to stay with me for 2 days per week, and during this time my son has been actually able to visit his paternal family without interferance, for the first time ever.
One request that I have yet to have her agree to has been for my son to stay overnight with me.
It is hard to fathom that she objects to my 8 year old son staying overnight with me, yet she had allowed my son to go interstate on his own to visit his aunty for a whole week, without even blinking.
However, this is something that I have been working on.
I think I will just have to force the issue when they return from China, as it is not a genuine concern, of this I am sure. I believe that she is on some level at least gaming the child support system, which determines level of support on the number of overnight stays with each parent.
In any case, I must be patient and try and to slowly persuade her to the wisdom of sharing the load, and hopefully common sense will prevail.
I should also mention that since our separation she has written on 7 occassions asking that we reconcile. These have been quite detailed letters. She clearly has gone to a lot of effort.
However I am not seriously considering such a move, but on an emotional level it does make the separation easier to bare at least.
