Whereismum, my heart really goes out to you. But I promise, you will come through this. Take each hour, each day, one at a time. Easy to say, hard to do but keep reminding yourself of it.
My H left us nearly a year ago without warning. He took all our money - our 10k savings and drained our joint account leaving me with a 10k overdraft too. He has abandoned his baby son - our boy was six and a half months when he naffed off. He has two children aged 10 and 12 by his exp and he also raided both their post office accounts (containing money left to them by his dead father) to the tune of nearly 8 thousand.
He has utterly abanoned them too. We saw them regularly. I know that he has not been in contact with them and stopped maintenance to his ex when he flew into oblvision.
He went to Thailand of all seedy places on earth, and has lied his way into an entirely new life.
His family have blanked me and our son entirely and seem to blame me.
My h told me in a letter just before going, that he was very unhappy and thought that leaving us 'would give myself and the baby a better chance at finding happiness'
It was all bollocks of course. He had been searching sex sites and prostitute sites, was signed up to online dating stuff and had already stopped doing any work in his teaching post. He planned his escape. I only discovered all this when he had gone.
I couldn't function for four months. I lost 3 stone. It nearly killed me and I had my son removed from me for three days as I was in such a bad way. This gave me an enormous bloody kick-start believe me.
These men are weird. Incredibly plausible and charming on the outside but very screwed up individuals with fantasies and a strange sexual deviancy that they hide very well (in the case of my h at least)
It is NOT YOUR FAULT. You sound lovely. You need now, to get your life in order with the prctical steps advised on here. I had to push the baby round to solicitors and banks, crying, hyperventilating, sweating constantly in panic. I didn't sleep for months. I have no family to support me but I had wonderful, wonderful friends on the phone who literally got me through.
Social services, my health Visitor, my GP and other 'authorities' were actually fantastic too. I got myself straight onto adti-depressants - 60mg a day to start. I am now on only 20mg. I changed my will, closed bank accounts and opened new ones, got my son a passport in case my h came back to snatch him (I honestly didn't know what the hell was going on for the first couple of weeks). I got good legal advice from a child law specialist and a divorce sol.
I found doing all these things gave me back some sense of control when everything in life was chaos.
Nearly a year on, I am much recovered. I still have low times - mostly though, when I get one more piece of shitty or bizarre information about the bastard that proves even further, the level of deceipt and treachery to which he can sink.$
We are still married as I cannot even divorce him - no address so can't serve papers. He pays nothing to me and the bank have now said I have to pay back the entire 10 grand overdraft he stole. But hey, I am alive and I have my gorgeous son, now 17 months.
This is not about me - I am just trying to encourage you with my story, to think and know that you will get better and get stronger and that you are 100 per cent better off without such a selfish, strange, nasty piece of work. You have your wonderful children to think of and to love. They will love you forever. They will know when they are older, what a prick their father was.
He may well have been hiding a darker side from you - he may well have someone else. But these are HIS problems now and if he has, he is HER problem now.
He can continue to fuck up his life royally. You though can now start rebuilding yours. He was NOT the man you thought he was, was he. He just kept up the facade for a long while. I was with my h 7 years and married 5.
He was a very very good actor though he did start to unravel a few months before he left. I only saw this in retrospect though.
Sorry if this is long. But be very kind to yourself now. Try and gain strength from eating just a little each day - bananas, porridge, toast. Keep focussed and try to get as much legal and practical advice as possible.
Can you put the mortgage on an interest-only basis? Go to the CAB and get advice from them. Ask the CAB about the ISA in his name. If you have a bank account in your sole name, transfer as much money into it as possible. Stop the direct debit on CHB going into the ISA.
Sit down and go through all your outgoings. Cancel what isn't totally necessary - animal insurance, any monthly leisure subscriptions, that kind of thing.
Tell your children you love them completely and will never leave them - that you are always there for them.
Give yourself small pleasures each day - a hot bath with scented oil, a bunch of daffodils. If you work, go to your GP and get signed off for a month or so if you can.
You will slowly get better, I swear. The pain and trauma will subside. You may even realise that life was a strain with him - you already intimate this in your post (...'there is less to do without him here' etc)
Know for sure that he is a cowardly tosser..he just didn't reveal that to you until now. It's his life, he is now the master of his own destiny and you of yours. Believe me, yours is a lot brighter than his.
And stop reading horoscopes. I did, immediately. They really are nonsense but they hurt anyway.
Many many hugs to you and keep posting on here. MN was a total lifesaver for me 10 months ago.
xx