I'm just so tired. My life seems like a constant battle. I'm 41 but I'm completely burned out. I know that most people's lives have difficult patches and tragedies, so I wonder if I'm just less able to cope than most people and need to pull myself together, but I don't know how. So I guess this post is a moan, but also AIBU to feel like I'm done and ready to retire already at 41? Or would most people just get in with it?
I grew up with a physically and sexually abusive step father. He and my mother threw me out to live alone at 16. Social services and police were involved but neither would help me. I lived in total poverty, no heating, electricity often cutting off, little food, couldn't afford launderette to wash clothes. I had to work full time while I did my education. Social worker told me to get pregnant then I'd get money and a house but I ignored her and studied. I managed to get A levels, a degree and a professional qualification but only by working full time and studying full time at the same time. I had a huge mental health collapse and tried to commit suicide a couple of times.
Eventually after all of this and working 80+ hours per week all through my 20s I had built a decent career. I met my ex-H in my 20s, we were together for years then lived together for years, bought a house, then got married. A few years later had children. I was so careful about him, no red flags. Nobody thought anything was wrong.
Then when our children were tiny babies he gambled away tens of thousands of pounds. I helped him, got him therapy and to go to GA, he had blocked all the gambling sites (so I thought). Then he walked out on us all. Turned out he had been having an affair. Didn't bother with the children for months. Later I discovered it wasn't just one affair, he'd been doing it all along since we met. Yet convinced everyone he was the model husband, all of our friends and families. Always worked hard, did his share of housework, kind and thoughtful.
Despite my personal feelings about what he'd done I encouraged him to build a relationship with the children again and we were co-parenting amicably, and then he was arrested for grooming children online. Many of them. Images. Talking to other paedophiles about them. It makes me physically sick.
Obviously since his arrest he's never seen our children again and never will. But they are so young still and I can't explain to them why they can't see him so they are traumatised by it. They saw him arrested. They don't understand. I paid for therapy for them. Then the therapist said she thinks he may have abused one of them. I failed to protect her, and I just can't come to terms with this. How I could not have known anything was wrong, having grown up with a predator myself. I am having trauma therapy to try to deal with it.
I have done everything I can. My physical health is collapsing, I have ME and have had for a long time but it's much worse since two relapses from having Covid after their father left and the pandemic hit. That was also fun, having a relapse while working full time with two very small children off nursery and not being allowed to see another adult for three months! I have bought a lovely house for us so we have a stable home but we live in an expensive area so my mortgage is huge. I need to be here for work and friends though: I'm lucky to have great friends to lean on and my children are finally settled and have good friends so we would never move.
I try to comfort the children when they're sad they don't have a father (all their friends are in nuclear families). I work full time and manage to earn a really good salary still but I'm not sure how long I can keep it all up with my health failing. Both children also have SEN so it's all completely exhausting. Childcare costs are huge because they can't cope with clubs etc and have to have nannies. So despite my salary between that and the mortgage we struggle for money. I had to pay all of the divorce fees and for other legal battles to protect the children. I had to get their diagnoses done privately because the NHS is so useless, I've been fighting social services for support for years, nothing has changed clearly from how they treated me as a child, they are useless and incompetent. I am fighting with school to try to get adjustments in place. Everything, everything has to be made into a fight.
I'm just so worn down by it all. The exhaustion, I'm in pain every day from my illness, being responsible for everything, the sadness at the impact on the children, how one day I'm meant to explain the truth to them and the damage that will do, and wondering how I managed to choose them the worst father possible. I feel so guilty. I'm trying to do everything and never having any rest, hardly any sleep. Never being able to follow the medical advice to rest so my health can recover. I am also ND so find all of this completely overwhelming really. I just don't see how I can sustain it all. I have family but none of them have ever lifted a finger through all of this, never had the children to stay or babysat them even once and they are school aged now.
I see other people getting on with their lives even when they have difficult things happen and I do wonder if maybe because I was so damaged as a child I have brought this on myself by making poor judgements or I'm just rubbish at coping generally and other people would just get on with it. I've tried so hard but things never seem to get any easier. I really do feel like I'm 75 and need to retire but sadly my bank balance doesn't agree.
I am just being self-pitying and need to pull myself together? I've always tried my best to carry on and get past anything that has happened but I feel absolutely broken now.