My soon-to-be-ex husband, Brian, and I are in the middle of separating after 10 years of marriage, 12 years together. Things aren't acrimonious, we just grew apart and weren't in love anymore, with 'blame' on both sides. We tried counseling for a few years, and decided to formally separate in February of this year. This has mostly been friendly and is going as smoothly as possible, I guess because we'd basically been living as friends for the last 3-4 years.
Right now, the kids stay with me during the week because I have a more flexible work schedule. He works 9-6 M-F and is living with his parents an hour away, so he asked if he could have the kids on the weekends. They come stay with him at his parents' every weekend. I've offered to give him weekends 'off' since his weekends are his only free time, but he's insisted that this works best since his parents are off weekends too. Everything has been fine and the kids are adjusting as well as can be expected (they also see a child therapist who they both love to deal with the divorce, which was my idea since my parents' divorce in elementary school was hard on me). We don't have a formal custody agreement yet and were planning to hash things out together once he was able to move out of his parents' house.
Sooo, last week, a former boss contacted me and offered me a kind of dream job. The problem is that the dream job is 7 hours away and in another state. I set aside time to talk to Brian about it, and asked how he'd feel about me moving so far away/to another state. Before I even mentioned anything about custody or what we'd do about the kids, he basically said he was happy for me since he knew how much I loved working with that former boss, and that he'd be really excited to "get to start over without kids."
I thought I was misunderstanding so I clarified what he meant. He didn't mean that it would be easier for him to date if he didn't have the kids every weekend, or only had the kids during vacations. He seemed to think that I would just be moving away and taking the kids with me for good and he'd get a fresh start, like he was literally divorcing the kids as well as me.
He isn't the most amazing dad and wasn't always super involved or helpful (a big factor that led to me wanting a divorce), but he always seemed to love the kids and was just a lazy father. I thought, I guess mistakenly, that things were better now that we were separated because the kids see him more often and seem to have a good time at his house.
I'm just at a loss here. Why would his first thought be that I'd just take the kids away FOREVER and that would be fine? How can he just not want his children anymore? He didn't bond well with them as babies but they have been talking, thinking, feeling humans for years now. What do I do about sending my kids to visit a dad every weekend who told me he didn't want them anymore and thought there was nothing wrong with that?
TL;DR: My soon-to-be-ex husband seems to think that by divorcing me he can also divorce our elementary school age children.
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