Not sure how to tackle this one...
I am a divorced man with two children at 18 and 21. Been remarried for two years now to a nice but very career driven lady with two 10 and 11 yr old children. They are from another country, as am I, (different to thiers, but i have a UK passport, they an ILR).
We have had a few issues come to light in our relationship and i do not know if i am seeing things as i should.
My wifes family speak another language as well as English and i have struggled to learn thiers. As a result i am often excluded from
converations on the basis that the ‘children must not loose thier language’ and so conversations go on without me. Visiting relatives coming to my home also insist that tbey speak thier language and it is for me to learn, not for them to engage me. If we are visiting them, i can often go for a few weeks speaking to very few people. My wife finds it annoying that i dont speak thier language and has pretty much ‘given up on me’ in that regard. Although we live in the uk, the home language is thiers, not english.
My wifes ex husband has only been very recently able to return back to the country after he had to leave for 3 years due to a visa issue. The children found it very hard. Now every effort is made to address his stability, including my wife arranging a job for him and paying for his housing for 6 months and receiving nothing from him in terms of mainatenance for many years. It often also happens that i will pay for many items for the children,as one would expect, when we are out and about. Because it is deemed important ‘that the children see thier father’ as much as possible after such a long time, my wife includes him in many of our family events, whether i am asked or not. Or she will simply go out with him and her children as a foursome with me staying home. For school issues etc, it is right that he goes with her but i do get irritated when he tags along for other things. In our discussions, she insisted that he is still ‘part of the family’ for the childrens sake. They are still quite close and she admits that she still cares deeply for him, because its good for the children. I find this hard.
My wife is paid very well for an executive level job and has a lot of family wealth and a considerable amount of money set aside. I work for myself but business is not doing well. We rent a house and pay half each. My children come to stay infrequently and thier is only me but my wife and stepchildren in the house. I am still expected to contribute 50:50. Our finances are seperate and our inly joint account is for the house. She has no wish to combine finds.That means at the end of the month i am in debt and she has a good amount left over. She often pays happily for the children's needs but is quite tight when we are out togeather. I end up paying for meals etc. I am very worried about my cash flow but am not comfident that i could rely on her if things started going south for me. I had a very bad situation last year where i needed help and ran out of cash. I had holes in my shoes and couldnt afford to replace them with a new pair for six months. She didnt notice ( i would not ask for a short term loan as that would be seen as a weakness in her eyes). she did however buy the children new clothes in addition to a new handbag whilst i walked around with wet feet. She often books expensive international yearly holidays which she will pay the ticket for with airmiles, but i am expected to pay the holiday expenses. The difficulty is that she can easily afford it whereas i cannot. She takes her children for a weeks holiday every year without me so that they get get some one on one time with her. I stay at home and look after the dog.
Although we are supposed to get every third weekend to ourselves where
The children see thier dad, she often ends up running around after the children on our one weekend a month (the ex doesnt have a car) so that in effect they are with us all the time still or she ends up driving them all to wherever they want to go. Despite my concerns, and requests that we have time to ourselves, i get the impression sometimes that she would rather be with them and so often ‘volunteers’ to assist in weekends which are not hers. The result is that she gets to see the girls almost every day despite them being with thier father, and we get little time alone. It feels a bit like she is trying to bring the family back togeather (again ‘for the childrens sake’) which of course the children absolutely love.
Our ‘intimate life’ is very mediocre and infrequent with her being ‘tired’ so she is glad to get to bed for an early night having worked all day (which i understand but am never the less frustrated by). When she isnt tired, she would rather cuddle up to her children than me and i often have to ask the children to leave the bedroom at night so i can get into my bed with her. All 3 look at me with an angry face as if i have broken up thier cuddle time despite it being 10pm. She then goes to sleep.
Life revolves around the children and every decision about our future seems to be based on them. The difficulty i have is that i am really worried about my future being so reliant on decisions which involve the comfort of others over mine. I have begun to feel that i have been used. Perhpas regarded as a bit of a ‘surrogate’ dad whilst the father was away. Now that he has returned i feel a bit side-lined. They all sit in my house speaking in thier own language with me not undefstnding the conversations, he is very involved in our life on a daily basis and any future decisions about where we live or how our live will look in the future will be based upon whether he can go too (for the childrens sake). I understand that happens when you marry someone with children but mine are not taken into account and it seems that the whole process is very one-sided and totally inflexible. If it means any disruption to her children or the reltionship with their dad who has been absent for a large prt of their life, its simply not for discussion.
There is a possibility in time that my wife will have to commute for work into the EU from mon-thursday which means seeing her even less. That would mean that i would end up looking after her children day to day whilst she was away working and thier dad was also working. As it is, my ‘work from home’ schedule means that i am often acting as the ‘manny’, picking children up from school and running errands for the family. I have only recently been able to put a stop to that as a daily expectation, as i now work a few days away from my local area and so have to work in the city for 3 days per week.
To cut a very long story short, i see my children about once a month as they are growing up ( i text or phone daily). I have not much money after my own divorce and no great income.
I have been offered a job in another country. We originally discussed moving to my home country for a few years when we first met. Now with the childrens father here after a protracted visa process, my wife says we will not be going anywhere unless he can come too and realistically she says that its unlikely she would follow me and move the children. That means i would have to go by myself. The job will mean me coming back every 8 weeks or so but i am not sure if things will ever work out. She is happy for me to go and realises that it would be good for me and my career ( i am 20 years from returement and am really treading water at the moment, thier being very few opirtunites in my sector at present). I do feel that if i took the job, it would put me back on a career track, it would pay very well and felieve my money worries and i would be overall happier. But in essence, i am not sure i would be missed that much and almost feel that it would be saying ‘goodbye’.
I am trying to second guess things a bit but do wonder whether she has a ‘this is the situation here, put up or shut up’ and is suggesting that i take the job knowing that it is an easy way of bringing a close to things amicably?