Let us rephrase your questions into one question: What is the best time to deal with reality? The answer to that question is: Now. Now is always the best time to deal with what actually is. Holding to vain hopes, month after month, inevitably makes things worse. Your wife is a second-generation trollop at least. She carries around within herself her family’s history of dysfunction. Whether she wants to or not, she transmits to your daughters her own childhood experience. That experience includes lack of affection, confusion, and neglect.

A runaway horse cannot easily be stopped by pulling back on the reins, but pulling on one rein while letting the other go slack usually works. That forces the animal to look backwards, and it is difficult to run forward while looking where you have been.

In the same way, your wife’s life will hurtle forward until she looks back at the experiences which formed her. But she has no willingness to do that, and you have no power to make her. Kids do what they see. You can tell them what you will, but they are learning from what their mother does. If you don’t stop it, your daughters will be the woman your wife is.

A three-decade study at the University of Minnesota followed children into adulthood. It concluded “nothing is more important in the development of the child than the care received, including that in the early years.” Your wife’s parenting style and lifestyle are having more influence on your daughters than you realise.

Pollyannas might have you stay, but you and your children need to live in the real world; not the Pollyanna world. You cannot make your wife into a different person. You can have compassion for her even while realising her influence must be minimised.

The best time to face reality is always now. Each day of postponement makes things worse. Document everything, find age-appropriate books on explaining divorce to children, and talk with an attorney. From that, a plan will emerge.