Man, I just don't get along with her anymore, or rather, She doesn't get along with me. All the work of having the kid's goings-ons as well as her extra expectations that SHE puts on herself, is just too much.
If I am honest, which I rarely am; I have pretty ridiculous expectations of myself too. For instance, I will want to fix a thing that I am coding. Sometimes the things that I code are extremely heavy lifts, in addition to being hard. --I used to lift weights, attained SOME competence in Japanese, and tend to choose goals that have the outcome I want, without caring about whether or not I understand the full scope of the project. --Kids are kind of like that. Where if one knew all the work and stress it would be to have them, one might not decide to have them at all. But then, one misses the inextricable joys that come with it.
I don't regret having kids; rather, I am very happy that I passed my seed on to the next generation. It's a kind of alien/robotic way of looking at it, but it seems to fill that existential hole that we all feel in the pit of ourselves from time to time. I do regret that we were unable to create a household of peace and love. There is love, of coarse, but it is NOT a shining feature. It's like it used to be a feature, but has become enshitified over years of tacking on more and more to our mental loads. And mostly I suspect, the goals that we kept our eyes on this whole time, have either dissappeared, been accomplished, or moved on from.
It has been nearly 20 years of my life with my (ex)wife at this point in time. (18 if it matters.) That is pretty much my entire adult life. That's 25% of my TOTAL life. Or 33% of my *useful Adult life. Looking back on it, it just seems a shame to spend that amount of time dedicated to one woman/ one person, just to have it all thrown away because of disagreements, bitterness, resentment. I wish I would have known that the mistakes I'd made would make it impassable in the future, so that I could have sadly left earlier. I suppose she feels the same though, with her man always having his eye on the future, NOT on her, in the present. I wanted a present and future, that I could share with her and the kids, a future to be proud of, so that is why I was always chasing the next thing.