A call for help

Hmmm.... where to start.......

For some reason, I always feel that I shouldn't talk about this sort of stuff, but a couple of phonecalls in the last few days have made me feel that's a mistake. Lets see.

Well, just about everyone who knows us should know by now that our marriage is in a mess. To be blunt, it's pretty close to being totally FUBARed, and we're about out of hope. Last weekend, things came to a(nother) head, and Chrissy decided she wanted us to separate.
As is sadly normal in these situations, I found myself totally unable to construct a coherent counter-arguement, or even dispute Chrissy's take on things, so we are now separated. I'm still in the house, just sleeping in a different room, and otherwise doing all the same house&family stuff as before.

So how did we get into this mess? It's a long story (of course) Suffice to say for now that we made mistakes right from the word go. It took us quite a while to recognise them, and when Chrissy did, I didn't want to hear about it. It took several years for me to really admit that we were having problems, more to do anything, and when this is combined with two young children, Chrissy's health problems, a fixer-upper house, a talent for procrastination, and a master-class fear of responsibilty and confrontations, I haven't made a good job of anything.

Chrissy has put a lot of effort into trying to fix things - here's a quick quote from Chrissy's blog:-
I have done everything I could to stop the denigration of our marriage, I tried every approach possible from the standard to the extreme, talking, counseling, praying, begging, seducing, ignoring, waiting, leading, following and everything else I could think of. Geoff says he can not think of anything I should have tried or anything I could do now or could have done in the past. But here we are.

I don't think denigration is the right word - I think disintegration is what Chrissy means, but otherwise, that's a good statement. Chrissy has tried all sorts of things, and in general, I haven't responded usefully. Then, when I try to change something for the better, Chrissy is often too depressed to respond, and I don't keep it up more that a week before

I don't know what to do and I'm afraid of failing whatever I try and making things worse. The result of this is that I don't do enough, and that does make things worse.

Now I've heard plenty of comments alongthe lines of "it takes two" to fix this sort of thing, but Chrissy doesn't trust me to do anything about it, and for that matter, I don't really trust me either.

Well, it's coming up on 2 a.m. and I don't quite know where I'm going with this post now, so I'm going to wind it down.

Please pray for us, if that's your thing, and I would certainly appreciate any suggestions if things that might help.

Goodnight,