No, this is a safety issue in the sense that my wife wants to feel safe in our home in terms of sanctity and spiritualy...will describe at some length in the next day or so, and will be glad for thoughts

thanks,
slpinseattle

I was posting earlier about how to make our home feel safe, a sanctuary. Here is more than a little background. I’m a 50 year old, been a SLP for 26 years, work in schools and hospitals. I have a wonderful wife, who is 39, and just started working as a psychotherapist after finishing her master’s degree. We have 4 kids between us, a 15 year old boy, her son from her previous marriage, a 15 year old son, mine from my previous marriage, a 13 year old daughter, mine from my previous marriage, and a wonderful 19 month old girl, ours together.

She is Chinese, having lived in China until she was 8, then moving to Hong Kong with her dad when she was 10 to rejoin her mom and older brother, who had moved there some years earlier because of fear her mom had about being pursued by the Chinese government because she had had relatives working in the US at a major university. When my wife was very young, she lived with acquaintances of her mother, and only saw her mom rarely because her mom had to work (when they were all living in China). Then when her mom moved to HK she did not see her mother at all for years, until her father decided to leave China to keep the family together, even though he had wanted to stay because he believed in the changes taking place in the country at the time. Her mom and dad are both educated, engineers.

I am of Jewish background, having grown up on the east coast, my mom and dad have been married over 51 years…my mom is a retired prof in biology at a major east coast university, and my dad is a chemical engineer and businessman. I have 2 younger sibs, a brother and a sister.

We’ve always had a passionate relationship, and enjoy connecting intimately as often as possible. My wife’s ex is a Japanese gentleman who spent all of him time smoking cigarettes and gaming on a PC. They lived on money that he father, a wealthy businessman from Japan, sent for them, and from money that my wife earned in jobs that she worked at. Eventually she went to university and earned a bachelor’s, when she was still in the previous marriage. Her relationship with her ex can be characterized more as a deep intellectual friendship with almost no physical bond or intimacy. There was some intimacy, since, she became pregnant, and at that point they decided to get married, which they did, using a civil ceremony at a municipal building and a JP. Eventually she could not stand even being with someone who never set foot out of the house and had no relationships with anyone, estranged from his parents and family, except the relationship with their son and with my wife, and so she left. He lived close by for a short time, but soon moved back to Japan because his father told him that he could no longer just keep sending him money. He is now 40, and works in a small office at a job created for him by his father.

What’s always been difficult for us has been the relationship with my ex. I was married for 13 years to a woman whom I met when I was living on the east coast. She was in the process of finishing her doctorate in molecular biology at a major east coast ivy league university (happened to be the one where my mom was on faculty). I was working in the local schools and hospitals at the time as a speech-language pathologist. We toured the west coast and decided to relocate to Seattle. To make a long story short, we moved, had 2 kids, and sadly drifted apart. There were some basic incompatibilities, but a lot of the responsibility was mine because I really did not do well at establishing a good balance between home and work, nor between non-relationship building activities and time spent connecting with one’s spouse. We did also have some style differences…I always wanted to be getting help, in therapy etc., and she always felt that “marriage shouldn’t be that much work”, and kind of didn’t go for the “headshrinker horseshit”

Anyhow, she finally wound up leaving to pursue an affair she had been having with the father of our son’s best friend, who was also coupled at the time (though I don’t think formally married—my first wife and I did have a nice, formal wedding with much fanfare…). That family also broke up in the process. I’m pretty traditional in that I truly believe that marriage is (under most circumstances) forever, and infidelity, emotional, sexual, or otherwise, are just not in my particular repertoire.

My wife, for a very long time, questioned very frequently whether I had continuing feelings for my ex, which (of course this is only from my perspective, but, hey, I live inside my skin, so that’s the perspective I have) was so completely over. She used to have dreams that I was someone with a mask on, like the old mission impossible, where the spy peels off a mask to reveal some other face beneath. She has a lot of anger and insecurity in general (of course we each have our own), some of it probably is family of origin stuff, but is a really wonderful, kind, good hearted person.

Unfortunately, at my ex has not been helpful to the situation. About 3.5 to 4 years ago, she stopped over our house (used to be where she had lived—she left and I took the house…the ex bought another house close by) and said a couple of problematic things. She’s always been a kind of “my way or the highway” person IMHO, and she remarked to my wife and I that she thought it was too soon for us to be moving in together (after over a year of being together, and being engaged at the time). That was a little presumptuous, to say the least. Then she said that she had decided that our 2 kids should stop attending Sunday school at the reform synagogue we attended, because she felt that they had had enough exposure to the Jewish culture. She is from a Catholic background where she was forced to go to Catholic school through middle school (she went to public high school), and her conceptual framework, I believe, kept her from understanding what liberal, reform Judaism is, which is, for my family background, not about belief at all but about exposure to the culture. She could only ever see it as “religious indoctrination”. In any case, my ex wrote it into the parenting plan that the kids should go to temple Sunday school with me. I very respectfully told her that I did not agree, and that if we disagreed, we should simply follow the process in our parenting plan for mediation. Maybe I was naïve, but I really believed that we did not need to become enemies over this one thing we disagreed with. I was willing to live with whatever the mediator decided.

Because I did not agree to what she wanted, and asked for dispute resolution, my ex told me that I could no longer come to her home, and that she would no longer come to mine. She told me that I could no longer phone her at her work or cell, and proceeded to block all of my emails. We went to the mediation. I insisted on separate rooms because I just did not feel like being lectured or to provide her the venue for some cathartic (and stressful for me) rant. Anyhow, the mediation ensued, at the request of my ex (she eventually realized that she was the one who would have to initiate mediation since she was the one who wanted to change the parenting plan). The mediation completely validated me, 100%. Obviously my ex was not happy about this, for a lot of reasons, not the least of which that she had been announcing to the kids that she they were no longer going to Sunday school…

I’m glad I stood up to her on this, because over time I have seen that if it wasn’t this issue, it would have been something else. She continues to want to talk with me about issues relating to our family situation. It’s interesting, because when my ex’s and my 2 kids are with her, I don’t question anything. She’s still with the guy she left for, which is good and fine and stable. She is a good mom, and I just don’t give much airtime in my head to what goes on over there. But she is continually “concerned” about what is going on at our home. We have an active, lively and loving home, but many of her concerns come from what goes on with my 15 year old stepson. There are a lot of kids like this—he has quite a lot of difficulty making or maintaining relationships with people, stays up and sleeps way too late, and has various fairly typical trials and tribulations for a teen searching for an identity. He was brought up as a rather extreme only (IMHO) and to this date has not once initiated verbal or other interaction with his 20 month old sister. The fact that his dad is pretty much absent from the picture also I think impacts him heavily. He was doing very poorly in school and then was enrolled in online school, where is stays at home 100% of the time and appears to be doing just about the minimum. He’s really enmeshed with his mom and there’s often not a lot I can do to influence the situation. My own 2 kids (from the previous marriage) sometimes bring info back on purpose and inadvertently, and my ex has come into my workplace asking me if I would agree to having the kids stay with her during the week and seeing me one day on the weekend (they’re currently 50/50) –I told her absolutely no way (duh)…but the problem with communication is that she (my ex) has been consistently antagonistic and rude to us. A recent example was a phone conversation when I drove my 13 yo daughter the mile to her mom’s house. When I got back home, my wife told me that my ex had been honking and yelling (my wife was in back of the house giving the baby a bottle and putting her down for her nap and so did not hear), asking where the daughter was…my wife told her that I had taken her home. Then my wife’s bf phoned and verbally abused my wife, telling her that we could all “go to hell”.

My wife and I are in the process of trying to set up a communications manager so that I do not have to have the stress to my family of communicating directly with the ex. My ex feels that it is ok to barge into my workplace, call me at work and on my cell, while barring me from doing so, and returns my letters unopened (e.g. as when I tried to write her, which is the procedure for invoking the dispute resolution in the parenting plan). When my ex got the note from my lawyer, I found a voicemail at work from her saying, “What’s with the lawyering? I think you owe me a call.” Um, I think not.

I have a responsibility to protect the sanctity of my home and family. My (present) wife feels vulnerable and I need to do everything I can to be proactive. My 2 older kids, who love their little sister and play with her daily for hours, have numerous friends and relationships with others (my son possibly wants to be an OT or PT, and is starting his first job in June), have been working and continue to work on becoming more sensitive. It is a struggle for all of us, and not easy for my wife. She and I still have a passionate, romantic relationship, but the communication with my ex, and for that reason dealing with my 2 older kids, because they are connected to my ex, is VERY stressful for her. Yesterday they were fighting as teens can do sometimes, shoving and kicking etc. over who could sit in a particular chair, and the nanny (our 20 month old has only had 2 nannies, and we just 2 weeks ago changed, so she is new, and speaks mostly Chinese) reported back to my wife that our 20 month old was shocked by this. Of course I do agree that they cannot be doing this, so we have been talking with them about this, but for my wife it is very overwhelming and upsetting. She says things from time to time about wanting to live somewhere else, while my 2 older kids are still home. Last night she was so upset and said again (I try not to empathize but get too upset—I know the value of self-calming…) that if that happened again she would move out with our 20 month old.

I also wonder if some of this is displaced concern for her own son. She is really strict with my 2 kids, which I actually like, since she is honest and loving and has totally good intention, and I trust her, and it has always turned out to be really good for my 2 older kids to learn to listen and work with her, in terms of their growth. I only wish she would let me anywhere near in terms of decision making re my stepson. Sometimes I feel helpless, like watching a slow motion train wreck, and yet I do have faith that things will eventually sort themselves out one way or the other. But he kind of has a whole chorus of family, etc making excuses for him. In the end, I have to concede that she is the biological parent. Sometimes I think it’s ironic because my 2 kids might actually be getting better quality parenting from her than she gives her own son…

So that’s what I mean about wanting to help my wife to feel safe. I want her to know that I understand, I want her to know that I will step up and advocate, be proactive with regards to communicating with my 2 older kids, and with my ex. Some of this is her stuff in terms of trust issues, but I really love her, she is a wonderful person and a wonderful partner, and I want to to everything I can to support her, and to support our marriage and family.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!