I don't know how to go into this without typing out the whole story here, but I'll try to be brief and to the point.
My husband and I have a 15 month old son who is the best thing to ever happen to me. I experienced severe suicidal PND and an incident of domestic violence in January when my husband hit me over and over again to stop me from harming my self. Although I do not agree with violence it is fair to say that he was probably scared at that time too and didn't think he had any other choice but to be so violent with me at that time.
He has never hit me before or after that.
However, since January, through medication and intense counselling, I have come a long way in terms of my confidence and self belief and I am even working now to set up my own business. I think that my new found confidence is not helping my marriage though. I feel like my husband is holding me back from what I know I can now do and expects me to still be that timid housewife and make sure the place is spotless, and the food is cooked.
I don't know if subconsciously I fear him after he hit me, but I do know that everytime I think about it or have to talk about it to councillors etc, that I just completely break down into hysterics and just never want to remember that day.
During the day, I will spend time with our son, while he's sleeping and in the evenings I'll work on the business and in between I'll get all the meals cooked as well. I can't always manage to do the dishes, I can't always manage to get all the laundry done, and I can't always manage to pick up the stuff off the floor, but fuck knows I do my very best to do as much as I can.
Today my husband blamed me because our son put his dirty pasta hand on our white walls. He had stood up on his highchair and sort of collapsed against the wall and made a mark after he's finished his dinner. I was trying to hold him at the time but it was just one of those things which I couldn't help. I didn't mind so much because I knew I could just wipe it off and it wouldn't really leave much of a mark. All the while my husband was watching me intently as I washed up DS and got him clean after his dinner and cleared his plate up. When he saw that the wall was not my main priority at the time he shouted at me and told me that I am a dirty woman who likes to live in filth and he is always cleaning up the mess that I'm always making. He does do his fair share of the housework, I'm not denying that, in fact I appreciate that, and I told him this when he said that he does so much around the house.
But when I said to him (whilst wiping off the pasta mark to leave a shiny clean wall) that we both have our roles in the home and we need to work as a team, he belittled everything I felt I had achieved into something meaningless. Coming out of my depression, something like sorting out the laundry would be a big achievement for me. (I know it sounds pathetic to the untrained eye, but my depression was so severe that I just couldn't do anything for myself. I couldn't even decide if I should wear socks or not).
I'm even crying as I type this because I had always thought of my husband to be quite supportive, but over the past few months he HAS been belittling me in subtle ways, calling me names, knocking my confidence and mocking my positivity.
I don't feel close to him, nor do I feel like touching him physically and I fear that if I begin to resent him what will happen to our son? He is extremely verbally abusive when he is angry and I don't want my son to hear things like that just as he is learning to pick up words.
Any thoughts are welcome. I just want to stop crying!!