Hi
I have not posted before but read regularly I am not a troll etc. I am living overseas and am really desperate for some help / moral support. We were living in Lincolnshire until this year, now living near DHs parents (retired expats whom have never really approved of me). I was a SAHM and really happy back home near my family. I basically did everything for the DCs right from the word go, whilst DH did next to nothing (despite a lot of requests)and basically got away with it for years. DCs were never close to DH and his family extremely close to my family etc.
We moved closer to DHs family for financial reasons. As soon as we arrived in the village, it was as though DH transformed into some kind of psycho in an instant and became a mouthpiece for his disapproving family. He started accusing me of being responsible for everything he considers to be wrong in our lives and keeps saying that I have failed as a parent because (variously) I never went back to work/ never let him smack the DCs/ breastfed/ stuck to routines for meals and bedtimes/ encouraged the DCs educationally. He says my bad parenting is entirely to blame for DC2s behavioural issues even though all I ever did was seek out information, resources and help and loads of people back home thought otherwise. I could go on.
He told the Dcs that my educational input has been worthless as I have failed to educate them in the school of life. As a result, the DCs have been shunning me and resisting even a 15 min reading session. for the first time ever, they are openly saying that they "hate" me and do not want to go out with me. They try to push me away when we go out as a family saying that they only want DH. DH is really milking it and taking them out for hours at a time without even asking me or telling me where they are going. This can happen several times a day. It has got to the point that as soon as I make a phonecall back home, I see him getting their shoes ready and ushering them out. His mother has been dropping massive hints that she does not want me around saying things like "let her go wherever she likes if she can`t cope living in our village, we shall look after the DCs here and there are always the school holidays for her to come and visit".
Yesterday DH says that his feeling towards me are ambivalent and that he stopped caring as soon as I reported him for small-scale DV a few years ago. This being despite the fact that he was completely in the wrong and I had him taken off the hook by withdrawing the allegation. He said that he only stayed for the DCs even though he would not even get off his backside to take them anywhere, teach them anything or even interact with thjem.
I am just so desperately sad and spend more and more of the day crying in an empty home to which I do not even have the key not knowing what he is doing with my precious children (and their minds) and wondering if they really hate me all of a sudden (and if so, why) and whether they will come round or i will end up being driven out by myself.
I want to take them back home but he has pushed all sorts of forms under my nose to sign in a foreign language to strengthen their residency here (even though they are British and we have not been here that long). Also, I no longer have a house (my parents cannot keep us for other reasons, I could rent i suppose. I am worried he would somehow remove them from the UK unless there was something I could do to prevent this; he has behaved terribly towards them for a while prior to adopting this Mr Nice Guy act.
I cant believe that this is happening to me. I am so much more effective as a parent than he is, yet he is discrediting me on every score. I dont know what to do with myself. There is no guarantee that he will drop his act or they will see through it. And he has so many people who would support him here regardless of his incompetence.