My wife and I have been married for 3 years and we have been together for 7 years. We are on child #2. He is almost 5 months old.
I work from home. She does not work. She cannot sleep with the baby, so we have an asymmetric sleep schedule. I am responsible for the baby from 8pm or 9pm to 4am or 5am. She wakes up at that time and we trade off. I wake up sometime between 8am and noon, usually when our first child wakes me up.
I wrote about my first child in my only other thread here. She is now 2 going on 3, and is still an incredibly difficult, incredibly independent little girl who does not express any form of affection and is delayed in all forms of social communication. I am convinced she has autism but I am not allowed to say this because my wife becomes upset. She can speak, and will speak, but does not pay attention to anything when directed to pay attention to it, does not address either of us by mama or papa, and only talks about things she is interested in. For instance, she can say "triceratops" and "stegosaurus" perfectly, but I have never heard her say "mama" except once as an infant.
On a typical day we have 1 or 2 hours together. Most days we do not have this time together because she is angry at me. She is angry and depressed almost all the time.
Today, I took the entire day off. It's a holiday in the US. Promptly after waking up at noon, we went into town and did stuff until we got home at 6pm. After 6pm, I took our daughter to the river and I occupied her for 2 hours. When I got back, it was time to put the baby down. The baby was difficult and did not go to sleep easily.
During the 8pm~9pm window where we usually put the baby down, I make a coffee, because I am up for another 8 hours. I offered to hold the baby while making coffee because my wife has been complaining about foot and back pain constantly recently. While making coffee, the baby became irate. She took the baby from me because she will not allow the baby to cry under any circumstance without her holding it. She then also turned off the light. This caused me to spill boiling water and coffee grinds everywhere because I couldn't tell my coffee maker was closed. She turns off the lights whenever possible, even when I'm doing stuff, because it bothers her to see dirt on the floor.
I got irritated but said nothing, I was just visibly annoyed. Once she had the baby again, she fed him and changed him. I thought she had already fed and changed him before giving him to me because she had him for 2 hours before I got home. She made no mention that he needed to bed or changed before giving him to me, and I explicitly said I would be carrying him while making coffee while holding him.
After that I had nothing to do and she did not communicate to me to ask I do anything. So, i took my coffee and went to check on my work. As I mentioned, I work from home. My productivity has been suffering because because I am staying up until 4am instead of working at normal times, and I am having to help more with the two kids. It is frustrating because if I lose this job I know I will have to work a normal 9-5 and I have no reason to believe my wife can handle the children by herself.
While on my computer, she walked the baby in circles, because she doesn't believe the baby can put himself to sleep and will not allow him to fall asleep on his own. She was doing a very noticeable hobbled gimped walk while walking with him when I went out to the bathroom. I offered to take him. She said no.
When the baby was finally laid down, she went to the bathroom and was audibly sobbing. She sent me nasty text messages about how I don't do enough, how I don't try, I do the bare minimum as a form of malicious compliance, and I have the easy job of staying up to 4am because he just sleeps when he's with me. I told her she did not communicate anything to me at any point in time.
I am extremely unhappy. I regret my choices in life. I feel like if I had married someone younger (we were 30 when we had our first) she would be able to keep up with the children. I wanted 4 children but she seems completely overwhelmed with 2 and doesn't seem physically capable of dealing with 2.
She has been making it more clear to me over time that she is not interested in more children (despite 4 being clearly communicated before we got married) and has also been hinted that if we ever got divorced she would deliberately try to make my life as difficult as possible. For instance, today on the way home, we were discussing the license plates on my truck. They are expired and I need to decide in which state I want to tag them. For various reasons, I would only tag them locally (thus avoiding a 12 hour drive to a different state) if I put the vehicle in a company we each own a half of. I joked "the problem with that is then you'd own half my truck" (a joke, feigning over-protectiveness of the truck [she can't even drive, she's from a european major city and has relied on public transit her entire life]); she immediately snapped and used very specific legal language about how I bought it after we were married, so under common law she already owns half of it. It felt very threatening and I did not appreciate it.
Last time I vented everyone told me I was shit and I'm expecting to hear that again. I just want to vent. I don't like talking about my problems to people I know. I just really don't like waking up in each morning noon.