'Working' on relationships

[pfrench]

I was always of the thought that if you had to 'work' at a relationship, it wasn't meant to be. But now my relationship definitely needs 'work'!

How exactly do you 'work' on it?

Circs are - been with boyfriend 4 and a half years, have a 1 and a half year old child. Child not a very good sleeper, and we've had a lot of work done on our house since he was born, so it's been quite stressful. We're often skint by the end of the month due to still spending money on our house project. We share childcare to a degree - both are slightly part time, he has to do all drop offs on days we both work, I do pick ups, and in general he's good around the house. No complaints about that.

But the overnight childcare response is beginning to get me down. It's all me - always has been. At the moment she doesn't want him to put her to bed, and will scream the place down if he tries, so I spend up to 2 hours of my evening trying to get her to sleep every night, and then usually an hour or so during the night settling her again after she wakes up. He thinks that the fact that she asks for me means he can just ignore it. We nearly always just go to bed in separate rooms because I end up bringing the child in with me to avoid having to spend hours at 3am sitting by her bed trying to make her sleep.

Added to that, by the time I get downstairs he's full on into watching telly, drinking beer or vodka or whisky and playing with his phone. Lucky if I get 2 words out of him. I think he drinks way too much, but because I don't really drink, I think this opinion might be skewed.

I can't help it, but his sucky attitude towards helping me out/being involved with the night time stuff, combined with never actually talking to me/being too drunk to talk to me is making me lose a bit of respect for him. He genuinely doesn't think he should be even there for bath and bedtime, and only stays sometimes because I say that it makes me feel better if we're both there - why I should I spend hours every night sitting in a dark room waiting for a child to go to sleep, while he has an evening? The stress from this is doubled by the fact that I need to work in the evenings really - I end up going to bed at gone midnight because I need to get 2 hours work in a night (teacher - and I now have to leave school at 4.30 to pick child up, used to stay until at least 6 to get all work done).

I don't know how to 'work' on this... especially since he gets the hump on if I dare to mention anything about it.

[HopeClearwater]

Sympathy

Two things:

1. Can you get advice from the forum on here about getting your child into a much better sleep routine? This must be so difficult for you, especially with needing to bring work home.
   

1. Much more important and out of your control is your partner's drinking. Sounds as if he has a problem if he's too drunk to talk to you. This is not something you can work on - he pours the stuff down his own throat for his own reasons. Hopefully someone more helpful than me will be along with more advice on this... You can't stop him drinking and all you can do is decide whether or not you want to carry on living with it.

[BeautifulMaudOHara]

You need to sort your child's sleep issue - sitting with them until they sleep isn't sustainable.