Not sure how to give the whole story without writing a novel, but having exploded all over someone else's thread I thought I would move out to my own :)
I've been with my H for 3.5 years, we were together for a few months then I got pregnant and we (after a lot of faffing around deciding what to do) got married. I was living in his home country at the time (he is an African Muslim); he refused to tell his family we were married until after the birth so I moved back to the UK to have our DS. H was there for the birth and three weeks after, and he told his family about it. He then returned to his home country and I stayed in the UK as a married-single-parent with no financial or emotional support. He moved over to be with us / study in 2010, and last year when he finished he moved back home. In February this year, DS and I joined him here.
Our life together has always been pretty rubbish, as you can ascertain from the above outline. He is not emotionally engaged - he can be very loving and caring but he is also happy to not speak to me or his son, even by phone, for weeks at a time when we are in different countries. He is not concerned with providing for us; when he has money he will maybe contribute to the rent, but has no qualms about my total financial, emotional etc support of our family. This means I have to work, which he is sometimes supportive of and sometimes resentful of. He wants me to be successful enough to be proud of, but not more successful than him, and not to the point where I am unable to look after DS / the housework etc.
So in the two months I've been here, he has been absent (physically or emotionally) and we had a huge row last week. He sulked and refused to talk to me - at all - for a full week, then a couple of days ago sat me down and listed my many hateful faults, which include negativity, ingratitude etc etc. He has bent over backwards apparently to welcome me and I have failed him. He is not sure what to do. He says that we are now fine (though no affection and still absent since then) but for me I have just had enough. I could give a hundred examples of him being a bully, emotionally absent, unfaithful (or at least extremely inappropriately behaved) and so on. I am not even angry any more, I just don't want to waste any more of my life on someone who, as far as I can see, doesn't even love me.
So (finally, sorry) to the point. I live with him and DS in this African Muslim country, and I can't quite work out how to leave him. I could open the conversation honestly and ask for a divorce which I think he would give me, but I can't risk that he then says "here's you ticket, I'll tell DS about you when he grows up" or in any way separates me from my son. Under sharia DS should stay with me until he is 6, but I would of course want to leave here, and I don't know if I would get custody to live with him elsewhere. DS is on a UK passport. Even if there are no problems with this side, I also have to work through the emotional issues of becoming (even more of) a single parent, and having to manage my son's relationship, or non-relationship, with his father. Hold my hand and help me to be brave please!!