I left my H 2 months ago after discovering that he had been sleeping with the nanny. DCs are 2 and just 5. This was on a background of very difficult behaviour over the last 2 yearrs since H lost his job. He had become very angry, started to drink heavily and was basically taking all his anger and bitterness over his situation out on me. We moved back to the country we were originally from to facilitate H getting another job and re-establishing his career. Things became worse just after the move culminating in one awful night where he went out drinking and came home and hit me. We spent the following 10 months in counselling (which I now realise was probably a mistake in view of the violence) as I felt that I owed it to both of us and our DCs to give the marriage everything I could. Things did get better for a while but went downhill again at the end of 2010. The final straw was the discovery of the affair with the nanny.
I left the house the next day and went to my parents with DS and DD. That same day, H called me and told me that he wanted to see the DCs. He arrived at my parents house smelling of booze, grabbed DS (2) and made for the car with him. Fortunately, I managed to wrestle DS from him. We (DCs and I) have since moved into a new house and are very happy. In view of the drinking and the incident with DS, I initially was only happy for H to see the children under my supervision. He now sees them on his own for 3 hours on a Monday and Wednesday evening and 4 hours on a Saturday and Sunday morning. He does not think that this is enough and wants to take them overnight. I am not happy that he has them overnight at the moment as I need to be fairly confident that he is not drinking and that they are not at risk when with him. He is very angry about this and says that my inability to trust him is my problem and nothing to do with him.
It is only since finding this forum that I realise that H was/is controlling and emotionally abusive. He blamed me for all his problems and says that I never supported him enough. He whined like a child if I said no to sex and claimed that he needed sex to feel close to me and for stress-relief. He claimed that I contributed nothing to the marriage (despite having a well-paid job and doing all the housework and cooking). He would pay for something, like a holiday and then throw it back in my face later by saying that I never paid for anything. His mood and behaviour became 1000 times worse when he had been drinking. His other trick was to be obnoxious to me in front of my friends and family so that I would literally be biting back tears in front of them. Occasionally if we went out for dinner he would be really horrible to me and I would be crying into my dinner in a restaurant full of people.
I realise that this makes me sound like a really passive person but I am, in fact, an intelligent, assertive woman in a respected profession and it is only reading through some of these threads that I realise just what he has done. The problem now is that he is still bullying me with regard to the children. He refuses to see that I cannot trust him with the children, especially as they are so young and vulnerable. I realise that he and they have every right to a relationship but my instinct is that he is not stable at the moment. My parents have offerred to take me and DCs on holiday which we badly need after the last couple of months but he has refused to let me take them unless he gets to take them away as well. I'm sorry that this is so longwinded but I just need some advice on how to deal with him as I still feel that he is dictating my life even though I have left. The awful thing is that I don't think he cares all that much about the DCs - he just doesn't want me having what he can't have.