great summation.

I always believed – and still do – that there is something defining about motherhood that men simply Do. Not. Get.

I don’t think I ever stopped resenting that in my ex.

After he went beyond our original agreement of spending 100K, he refused to discuss finances with me (anytime I brought up money I was a materialist, consumer society victim with messed up priorities) and refused to go and get a real paying full time job even though cash was flying out the door at a rate 2K a month during the several months it took to sell the apartment. To defend what he had done he would always say to me, “you can take what is left of the money and do what you want with it, I would support you if you had a dream”.

Like your situation, what he didn’t get or refused to see is that I would never never never take that much money, that could have been used for my family and spend it on myself. For a very nice down-payment for a house to live in for the rest of our lives with little mortgage remaining, a vacation house to have nice times in, to assure we would have the money to be able to continue to send our son to private school and then pay for college, for our retirement. For US.