DH has left again

[AndHarry]

Third time in as many years. He sat me down last night and said he was unhappy and thought we should separate. I asked him what he was unhappy about and what I needed to change. It was difficult to pin him down to anything but then it came out: he wants me to do things for him like sew buttons back onto his shirts and fix his trousers when there's a hole in the pocket or the hem has dropped. That's it. He wants to put me through all this again because of a few buttons. It's so incredibly pathetic I would laugh if I wasn't crying.

What it actually boils down to is that he wants to feel respected as the manly head of the household, even if he hasn't put it like that. As I told him last night, it's difficult to respect him when I feel like his mother: organising everything, picking up after him, reminding him of essential things that need doing for the kids, coming into the kitchen many days to find it full of dirty crockery from the day(s) before (I cook, he washes up), struggle to tidy up because the bins are overflowing (his job) and have to cajole him into coming out with the kids instead of sticking on a DVD and lying on the sofa all weekend. I have tried and tried in as many ways as I could think of to make things easy for him and do things for him but get ground down by the sheer laziness of his response. The more I do, the less he bothers.

I said I would do everything around the house if that would stop the arguments and resentment, just to be stonewalled with 'it won't work'. I asked him to try doing the household chores he had agreed to do, consistently, and got 'it won't work'.

I pointed out that I had supported him in going to the gym every morning before work and going out with his friends several nights a week so that he gets his own time. Apparently 'it's not that'.

I said how hurt I was that he had complained about what I cooked so I only made the things he said he wanted but he still orders pizza for himself. How hurt I am that when I did as he asked and made his lunches he didn't eat them, preferring to get fast food instead. 'Shrug'.

The fact is that he has a pretty cushy life but, as he repeatedly points out, he is the 'breadwinner' while I only work because I want to, so anything wrong around the house is immediately my fault for not being wifely enough.

I ended up screaming into my pillow with sheer frustration. He didn't come to bed and this morning he wasn't in the house and his car has gone.

Another fall to the tax office to sort out tax credits tomorrow. Another time trying to keep myself together for the kids, dealing with their anxieties over their dad being gone, pretending that he's in meetings or at the gym every evening. Dealing with my parents' disappointment again.

I'm sorry this is an essay. I don't want anything, just needed to get it out.

He totally confuses me sometimes. He rang me because I left the DC with BIL and FIL for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon (at BIL and FIL's request), which worked out quite nicely for me because I wasn't feeling very well but I would have done anyway as the DC love going there. Apparently I can call H any time if I need some time off from the DC for any reason, but he won't actively plan to spend a bank holiday with them, when they're staying with him anyway?

I was thinking back this afternoon to how we both behaved when our house was burgled. H spent the entire day sitting on the sofa being miserable, eating junk and watching action movies to 'de-stress'. I organised for my parents to take the DC for the day, called the police, called the insurers, called a locksmith, liaised with my insurers for my car to be taken to a secure garage (keys were stolen) while the locks were changed, dealt with all of the above, made a list of cards to cancel (H's wallet was stolen), sorted out a temporary buggy (buggy was stolen... you get the picture :o), booked a hire car (H's car was stolen too), walked 2 miles to pick up that car and then drove him to work the next day in the hire car with the DC and chauffeured him around his customer appointments. It's been the same in any crisis situation: he buries his head in the sand and feels sorry for himself while I go into action mode and sort everything out. This obviously carries over to how he's behaved about the debts and why his business is in free-fall because he can't cope emotionally with me divorcing him.

It's also PMT time for me again and I've been getting The Rage at random moments when I'm reminded of him asking me why I couldn't just do all the housework when he was there. He clearly resented doing anything at all around the house because that was my job and he didn't really feel like doing me a favour by mucking in. No way, matey.

Apparently I can call H any time if I need some time off from the DC for any reason

Of course, otherwise he misses a chance to mindfuck you.

Keep taking the DC to the ILs. :)

The court has sent the initial papers to H. He's taking his time to read them. Grind teeth, deep breaths...

He's off to a wedding this weekend so asked if I could keep the DC here. No problem, I said we'd swap weekends, but by this morning he'd managed to convince himself he's doing me a favour

I was thinking last night about the conversations we used to have about basic household tasks and how he would say that he didn't know what was wrong with him, he knew what needed to be done and that he should do it but he just couldn't. I told him that no one actually likes doing chores but adults just get on with it, but he was convinced that there was something wrong with him. I would wonder how someone who worked so hard at his job and setting up his own business to support his family (as I was repeatedly told when I said it wasn't much fun having him disappear back to the office every evening after dinner) could be so bone idle when it came to mucking in at home and with the kids. Last night though I realised that unless there's financial gain or something that will make him look good, he's not really interested. It was never about supporting his family and all about him. He always blames problems on someone else/bad luck and the 'something' wrong with him stopping him from doing the washing up was yet another way of avoiding taking responsibility for his own failings. It wouldn't have mattered what I did, he is selfish, shallow and immature and incapable of having a mutually supportive adult relationship. I'm not perfect and there were/are things I could do better, but it would never have been enough.

I'm also wondering what is wrong with me. My ex before I met H was a horrible, abusive slimeball who destroyed my self-confidence. I obsessively read advice on how to make conversation because he acted like I bored him. His words when he finally dumped me were, "You look amazing, like a supermodel, but you don't have the personality to match." By that point, I believed it :(

The chap before that was super-needy. In sheer desperation I found myself a job abroad as a gap year after VIth form college a year in advance but couldn't stand the clingyness. When I told him I didn't want to be with him anymore he had a Crohns flare-up and was hospitalised for weeks. His parents asked me to get back with him until I moved abroad, just to make him better, and when I refused they started a vicious hate campaign against me that lasted until I finished my A-levels and escaped and started up again when I came back until they moved away.

How can I possibly trust my own judgement after all of that? I'm scared I'm going to fall into yet another awful relationship with a man I think is amazing until it's too late to extricate myself without major repercussions. I can't do that to myself or my DC.

I've just had a look at the Freedom Programme and there are several courses running in my area but I think the online one would best suit my hectic schedule.

I'll look at that book too, thanks for the recommendation.

I don't understand how I can be a nice, caring, intelligent person and not know how I keep getting into these horrible relationships.

It's because you're a nice, caring person. We judge other people in the frame of ourselves. If you were the sort of person who took advantage of others kindness then you would assume everyone else was, but you're not. So, you expect people to be decent because you are. Most are decent - always remember that - but some are not. You need to learn to recognise those who belong to that minority, and that's one of the things the Freedom Programme teaches you.

Have you seen the thread about cheeky people? The one that started the legend of the Mexican House Thief? Many, many MNers tell stories of the utter cheek of peOple they've encountered. It's gobsmacking and funny and salutory. At one point Expatinscotland tells people how to recognise chancers, as her take is "why on earth do you lot let people do this sort of thing?". Why indeed? Because on the whole, we wouldn't be so damn cheeky, so when someone else is we're so shocked that we fall straight back into early conditioning and behave politely, so these people get away with it.

It's a similar thing.

Here's the Mexican House Thief thread if you want to read it. The Thief is somewhere about halfway through, and was posted by Eternal I think.

I can't believe it's been two years since the Mexican House Thief thread! I just spent an hour re-reading it with my face like this: :o

The one episode of pure cheek I've put up with, apart from H's antics, was just over 4 years ago when I was having investigations done for pancreatic cancer. DS was 1 and I had awful PND but someone thought it would be a good idea to put me in charge of a girls' youth group and I said yes. One set of parents spent months criticising everything I did - not to my face of course - as I soldiered on running activities while terrified I was going to die and leave DS without his mum and fighting a truly appalling set of bureaucratic screw-ups that meant the investigations took months. This culminated in them ringing up the area leaders to complain about my failure to organise an activity one week, letting down their girls as usual. I was in ICU recovering from 8 hours of surgery! And being me, I had organised cover but apparently this wasn't good enough. Then when I was at home recovering, they expected me to drive their girls to camp (I couldn't drive for 4 months) and sleep on the floor in a stranger'so house for 2 nights, mouthing off about me to a lot of people when I said no. H invited the father over to our house to discuss the situation and clear the air so I sat and listened to him going on about how disappointed he and his wife were, how they understood thungs were difficult for me but they had to consider their own girls first etc. for an hour while H nodded along. I was absolutely crushed at the time but I feel so angry just thinking about it now.

Which reminds me that on the day I was admitted for surgery, I wasn't allowed to eat but we stopped off en route so that H could get some breakfast. Once we were at the hospital we had to wait a couple of hours for someone to use the theatre before me, so H went to move the car to a less eye-watering expensive carpark. He also decided to go and get himself a second breakfast without telling me and was gone for so long that not only did I have to sit by myself for over an hour but he also missed me going into surgery. I was really upset but he was furious with the hospital for not waiting for him to get back!

He left to move the car just after the prep talk from one of the registrars, who went through the worst-case scenarios with me, using helpful illustrations to show just how many parts of various internal organs I could end up losing, before I signed the disclaimer. That was a fun wait. By myself.

Last one. I'm on a roll :o

The week after I was discharged from hospital, on a lot of heavy-duty painkillers and physically unable to lift anything heavier than a small bottle of water, H had signed us up to attend a weekend reunion with about 100 of his former colleagues. At the reunion he chatted to his mates, leaving me to run around looking after our 1yo for the whole weekend

He is a disgusting excuse for a man. What an awful time you have had with him. Just for the record, it's not normal to do those things - the eating when you can't, the disappearing without letting you know what's going (I bet that wasn't the only time he disappeared with no contact), ignoring you and excluding you, going to that reunion when you'd only just come out of hospital and so on. It's not normal.

If/when you are ever, ever ever tempted to get back with him, just read those posts. Yes, it was that bad.

Those people! Complaining because you were in hospital having major surgery, and all the other crap they came up with. It is nice to think karma will catch up with them.

The good news is that I'm not tempted. I'm extremely lucky in that as a couple of friends going through or just completed divorces are heartbroken and it's awful.

I'm struggling to articulate why I'm so annoyed and I think I might be being unreasonable. H has now informed me that he's closing the business and needs to change the days & times when he's responsible for the DC to fit with a normal working day at a company over an hour away. At the moment he has the DC every other Wednesday and Thursday as well as EOW but that will need to stop.

I suppose I feel that I've juggled and changed my working patterns to facilitate his career for the past 5 years and much thanks it got me, with him sneering at my part-time job and demanding that I do all the childcare and housework because he worked FT. Now I'm working FT with hours negotiated to fit around the DC and he still expects me to enable him to work whenever and wherever he wants with no compromises whatsoever. He can take a hike AFAIC.

I'm surprised you're surprised. Have a re-read of this thread and you'll see this latest episode is entirely consistent with his behaviour and world view, namely that the world exists to serve him and his needs are paramount.

Why do you think you might be unreasonable? If you said to him that you had changed your work pattern so that you now required him to take the children every weekend and every third Tuesday, would that be reasonable? That's exactly what he's said to you.

Do you have any formal contact agreement in place? If not, now is time to start moving in that direction. The standard MN phrase for this situation is "that doesn't work for me". He has no more right to arbitrarily change contact arrangements than you do.

On the other hand, good news he's winding up the business, there was a fair whack of change in the accounts which you'll be entitled to, no?

The feeling that I might be unreasonable comes from the fact that I could pick up the DC every day after school/nursery, I just don't want to if it's because he says I have to. Reversing the scenario does help me feel less like that though, thanks.

I've told him that the previous arrangement of me picking them up every day every week no longer suits my working hours and he will need to make arrangements on those days, but he's gone off in a huff.

Well, of course he has! You aren't rolling over and acquiescing, naturally he will go off huffily.

Don't roll over, do the broken record. "That doesn't work for me. You will have to make arrangements." He can find a child minder or whatever for the time after school until he can get them, just as you would have to. He would have to pay for it himself. He may well find that he can do the childcare himself though, once he realises you won't pick up his slack.

I'm in a vile weepy mood ATM anyway (PMT again, despite the meds :( ) and apart from the main issue, I'm feeling hard done-by all over again reading some of the Christmas threads. Last year he got me three presents: Neutrogena Norwegian Formula hand cream, which I loathe, a packet of false nails from the supermarket and an oven glove This year I'm buying myself a Christmas present and it's going to be good.

Did he have some sort of hand fetish? What an odd and insulting set of non-presents.

I don't know about the hand fetish but a quick glance at our joint account tells me that he spent £3410 in Beaverbrooks yesterday. I'm dying to know what he bought. My money's on a watch.

Are your finances now separate? Does this hit your bottom line? You might want to point out just how much after school care that would have bought for the days he's responsible for the school pickup.

Our finances are now totally separate except for the joint account, which my name should have been removed from by now. It doesn't affect me at all so I was just being nosy I suppose The only thing that does annoy me is that he owes my DM just under £2000, which he hadn't made any move to repay for some time.