I've been married to H for 8 years, together 15 years, DD is 8, DS is 2.5.
He is an agency nurse, I'm a SAHM.
We both worked throughout the first 8 years of relationship, I was always paid less than him but I suppose the first alarm bell/thing I should have pt my foot down about was when we got our first place and he made me still pay half of bills/rent despite lower earnings.
When I had DD I was a self-employed cake-maker and then SAHM until she was a year old, i think. NO mat allowance/SMP for me as we had been living abroad. H started 2 years nurse training when DD was 2 months old.
Then I started doing cakes again, and I got into £2K debt by using business CC for food, daily expenses and biz costs because I had no access to DH's earnings (he was by now working shifts as a trainee, and paying all household bills while I looked after baby DD and was expected to do all housework etc as well as trying to run biz). He bailed me out £1K and I took out a bank loan with £60 monthly repayments - so this repayment had to now be generated by the (precarious) cake business.
Then we moved towns and I took on a unit in the local market hall which I made into a cake shop. The trade/footfall was so poor that it became totally pointless, so I left. Did cakes from home, kept it ticking over. Got pg with DS and then got a job which lasted till I was unfairly dismissed after 4 months (tho H had told me just to quit anyway as the stress was affecting my health).
Fast forward to today - we have moved again, to a tiny town with v few job opps. We moved for H's work; got DD into the local primary school and it's a nice place to be. Recently the hospital was recruiting, and H gave me a very hard time and a lot of pressure to apply for a job as a healthcare assistant, which I do not feel suits me.
I only get the CHB, have to ask for any other money - to which H responds with a sigh and a glare and "haven't you got any money?". Sometimes I take small amounts of cash from his pockets. With the CHB I pay for DD's school dinners, swimming lessons, clothes for the kids (from charity shop), shoes for the kids, food/drink/cleaning/toiletries bits and pieces throughout the month, gifts and cards for friends/family.
Last year I couldn't pay my phone bill so it got cut off. I knew why but pleaded ignorance - started using landline. I couldn't afford the bill, and I couldn't tell H or ask him to pay it. After a few months he confronted me and said he had therefore paid £16 a month for my phone calls and he would like the money back, please. He texted my mum and told her I'd been cut off, and that I had been "costing him" £15-20 a month. My family were horrified that he had been like that about it, and my brother has put me on his phone plan so that I never have to worry about it.
A few months ago, we had a huge row and he said that from now on, I must do 100% of the housework if he earns 100% of the income. Apparently the kids don't want for anything (not true actually, as CHB does not cover everything a child wants/needs), and as for me, i have nothing to complain about as I have a roof over my head and food to eat.
He buys and semi-hides large bottles of rum - i recently put out all the bottles for recycling and there were 7 from the previous 5-6 months, which was pretty mortifying to see. I also find little bags of weed in his sock drawer, and lighters in his pockets though he doesn't smoke fags. He goes to the pub freely once or twice a week.
He bought a £500 fucking whistles-and-bells fancy cooker without us looking at any different ones together, and then comments about my apparently lax care of the cooker HE bought that was SO expensive.
I don't drive, and he bought an old school minibus for £1500 and has been converting it into a camper van. Now that his car is kaput and he's going to have to get rid of it, he says he's "set on" just having a camper van and ditching the car and the current van. How can I drive that when I learn to drive?
i wanted to enrol on GCSE Maths at the college in the next town last year, to improve my employment chances, and suggested that, as he is quite flexible as an agency worker, he could fit his shifts around my weekly trips to town to study. He flat out refused.
He leaves everything for me to clear up, and for a while would e.g. decide the living room needed tidying and gather everything together and dump it in the middle of the floor - so that I had no choice but to deal with it.
Oh my god, I could carry on writing about incidents for pages and pages and pages.
I am so undervalued and am thinking about getting out of the marriage. The ££ side of things is just a part of a wider pattern of abuse, as I know is standard. I can't manage on just the Child Benefit all month, and I am nothing but an inconvenience, feeling like a guest in my own home, a feeling of earning my keep. I still feel like I have to prove myself, prove that I do enough, that I must show that I realise how much H does for us/how much I should be thankful that he is supporting us. And it makes me sick.
Fuck this. Thank you if you have read this far.