Dear fellow mums
I feel totally frustrated and I don't know how to get out of this rut so I'm wondering if anyone has the solution or just empathises with this. I work full time in a stressful, all-consuming but rewarding job. It is not particularly well-paid. My husband is retired as we have a significant age gap. He has a few odd jobs but essentially he is around the house most of the day whilst I'm at work and the children, 6 and 9, are at school. All of our combined funds goes on the children, food, bills and the home help we get.
The frustration is that I feel stuck in a certain level of living which feels pretty joyless. Whilst I adore my children and thank God they are healthy and happy, and I am also grateful for many other blessings, I'm talking about seemingly trivial areas which nonetheless seem to have quite a profound impact on my mental well-being. One is that we never have enough money for proper home improvements so the house and the frontage and back garden looks tatty, untidy and in need of a lot of money and attention to look decent. We don't have that sort of money and we almost certainly never will unless we made significant changes which I will go on to describe in a minute. The second is that we also don't have money to have the sort of holidays and adventures I would want, or even to go to restaurants or for me to go to the hairdresser or get new clothes without thinking hard about it. We are lucky that we have some friends who lend us their holiday home which is what we do every year and it's lovely, but ideally I would love to treat my children to something new and I get a thrill from adventures. So there are things I could do to save more but this is what they are. Both my children attend the private school I work at as a teacher and they get two thirds off the fees as I have a generous remission. Nonetheless, that's still costing us £15,000 a year. It's an excellent standard of education though, and my sense tells me that this is more important than uprooting them and spending that money on a new front drive for example, besides which £15,000 will go a long way more in their education than it will paying for the things we need at home. The age gap is another area I regularly feel really sad about. At the time, when we met, it felt fine and he is a caring man who is loving to the children, but essentially I am constantly anxious about our future and the physical attraction isn't as strong as it used to be and he is very set in his ways - he is content with how things are and is too old to change it anyway as he hasn't got the energy . He does home improvements as he is practical but they are always slow and he is not a tidy person but then neither am I but as he is the one in the home all day whilst we are out, it would be so much easier if he could spruce up the place. He holds onto things and isn't good at just throwing things out, partly as he is very OCD about polluting the planet with unrecycled waste so getting rid of anything is a painstaking experience involving sifting through so it just gets left. He objects on principal to getting a skip so we can just quickly go through things and at least live in a decently tidy environment free of clutter. I can't help feeling completely stuck and slightly panicked with my life, and looking around me at my friends who are nearly without exception in comparatively "normal" relationships. I want to pay for some counselling or someone to help me cope better mentally with all this, but that too is very expensive. Therefore I'm here in the hope of finding any support and I am very grateful to you for reading this.