it's always complicated, isn't it? if i had a magic wand to wave about over you and wandrew (and others), i would. sadly, there's rarely a quick fix solution.
and you don't talk too much: that's what friends are for, to coin a cliché.
I wouldn't ever say, "Stay together for the sake of the children," but in your case there is so much more to it than that. I think that it would be easier for you to amputate your right arm than it would be for you to leave your wife and children, so I'm glad that you are finding a way to fix this.
Why is the fact that you have two other children from previous relationships that you knew nothing about until recently such a problem for your wife? Would it actually make it easier for her to deal with if you did have a DNA test and proved to her that they were yours?
I fear that she wishes for the opposite. She wants to prove that they are not related to me and all this will go away.
I have yet to figure this one out. I know she has told me that she feels that I am losing interest in our family, but that's bullshit! I think most here know that's bullshit. All our problems seemed to start last year, when I fucked up and set up a meeting with the older son on "Father's Day."
I must re-state that "Mother's Day" is a very big deal around here. (You know why.)
I think that she expects that my lack of sensing some powerful emotional sentiment over a Hallmark Cards, made up "SPECIAL" day, is somehow a testament to some parallel lack of caring about my current family at large. It was quite a rough time, leaving on that night (over a year ago) to go into the unknown and meet up with a stranger, who seemed to be connected some way to my life. I had to really push past myself to do that. She has no concept of how difficult, yet how important, that trip was to me.
She has also used my horrid personal failure (meltdown or what ever the fuck you want to call it) on return home ...
(remember, I went into the hospital the next day, due to a terrible anxiety attack from melatonin abuse and the attending doctors proceeded to pump me full of Valium, which landed me in intensive care with a heart rate over two hundred BPM. I can not take those kind of drugs, but they did not ask, they followed protocol, hit me up and when I reacted badly, called the police and had them point guns at me. Now that I think of it, I may not have told the whole story about how I ripped up the room they were attempting to treat me in, flipped the table through the window, held down the security guy who was working the morning shift and stepped in to help subdue me, wrapped the hoses around the doctors throat, tore the cabinet off the wall and used it as a shield against the guns ... some other shit that I don't remember, too. When they gave me Valium, on top of the melatonin, I went a little nuts, got really fired up and broke things. It took three shots (one in the leg, one in the back and one in the neck) of some anti-psychotic (I forget what it was, now, but they also give it to schizophrenics and Alzheimer's patients who are suffering from deep panic) for six or seven people to get the straps on me and get me into a bed where they could wheel me around, take some blood, pin me with electrodes, measure stuff, give me oxygen, electrolytes, fluids, etc. It was one of my worst days. I was supposed to sleep for two days, I heard the doctor who stabbed my neck saying, but I awoke thirty minutes later, pissed off as HELL! ... but tied down.)
... as a way of demonstrating how all this is "just wrong." It has been almost impossible to make her realize that the two incidents were only related by my own inability to sleep under certain stresses COMBINED with my experimenting with melatonin during that time, coincidentally.
SHE is just fucking wrong! The two things are NOT related in any other way. I am not going to go nuts again, over having some sort of relationship with my two grown sons.
It was all due to the drugs. I HATE drugs. The only drugs I can take are alcohol (puts me to sleep), pot (wakes me up), and caffeine (puts me to sleep, relaxes me). All the others have effects that are not predictable on me. I know that seems fucked up, but that's the way it is. IT WAS THE DRUGS! It was not the trip to Texas or the meeting or the fact that I had not slept in three days.
Yet, she brings this all up, over and over again.
I wish I knew why she can not separate the two happenstances. Hell, things are really good for me, now. I'm not so depressed, I have a job again, I've lost weight, my health is decent, life is good, except for her and MY (couple) bullshit.
We will sort this shit out in a way that makes sense, though. I will not give up at this point. Not yet.
I don't think she even sees that I am happier now, than I have been in about four or five years.