How do I stop feeling so resentful?

[slothsandunicorns]

Regularish long term poster here but have name changed in case DH looks for any posts under my usual username.

I am usually someone who can see the positive side of things and will use this if I am feeling unhappy but lately am struggling to get past my feelings that this is my lot now. I have 2 healthy DCs, I am healthy, I have a satisfying job, I own a house and a car...there are lots of good things.

However, I am feeling increasingly resentful towards DH. I have always been the main earner and this has been mutually agreed. I am completely fine with this BUT we are finding it increasingly difficult to stretch my income and our tax credits/child benefit to cover everything each month. I have recently retrained and have had to start at the bottom rung of my profession's payscale. It will increase but this will take a few years. On paper this should be OK as our outgoings are comparatively low and we can afford bills/food etc but once they're paid there is little left over for anything like birthdays, new clothes, school uniform, holidays, school trips, house maintenance emergency...and something like this crops up every month.

My parents died a few years ago and we used the inheritance to pay off the house and DH gave up his part time job to do a degree. So whilst he wasn't earning he was around for school pick ups etc. He didn't get any student income as studied with the Open University which is not eligible for loans or grants apart from for tuition fees. He has now graduated and did well. I was hopeful that he would be able to find work so that instead of scrimping and just about getting by each month we could have a larger family income and feel less panicky about extra expenses etc.

However DH has said he does not feels anxious about applying for jobs as he has been out of the workforce for so long. I can understand this would be difficult and why he feels nervous about it. Things came to a head a few weeks ago when our money ran out when we had a few nephews' birthdays to pay for. DH had a go at me for not making enough effort to find ways to pay for them (his suggestions were digging out old Tesco vouchers, using DDs Amazon voucher that she won at school for outstanding achievement). I felt I had already put the effort in by earning the money despite the fact it was not enough. We had a big discussion where I put my foot down and said that if he is too anxious to look for work he needs to get it diagnosed and claim sickness benefits.

He has since seen the doctor and is on a waiting list for CBT which will take some weeks for an appointment to come through. Not able to apply for sickness benefits yet. He has now enrolled to do an MA and the student funding this time will provide an extra £200 or so each month which can be put towards the family income. So better than nothing. But still not enough to put towards a holiday or get an occasional takeaway on a whim like other families who have two working parents seem able to do. DH's attitude to getting money is always to see what he can borrow or what benefits he can claim. It is never get a job and earn money.

I feel bad moaning about this as I know as a family we have a lot more than others. But then other families seem to have much more than us. I just want to have a reserve for emergencies and a little bit extra to do something fun every now and then. I find the endless scrimping and juggling exhausting and feel very down that I'm going to have to do this for the foreseeable future. If I earned an extra £10k a year I would be more than happy for DH to play computer games in his pants all day if this made him happy. Splitting up would not solve this problem. It's not the simple fact he doesn't work more that I feel unsupported and trapped each month. Although I understand things aren't easy for DH either. So this it. How do I make peace with it?

Thanks so much if you've been able to get to the end of this. I may not be able to reply straight away as I can't sign in under my usual username etc.

I have been a writer and editor for over twenty years, and I've seen this scenario over and over. I've known brilliant writers spend ten years with about 30,000 words to show for the time. It's a very unique predicament that writers get into; you don't really find it elsewhere. There's this belief that takes hold that to "write well", you need to be free from worldly concerns and have endless expanses of time, unconstrained by obligations, and that somehow, in these circumstances, the perfect novel will descend from the ether into your mind -- and you then only need to type it out.

However ... to be blunt, if he wants to be a writer, he has to produce work. He has to finish manuscripts. If he's been trying to write or finish a basic 70,000 word manuscript for over a year and hasn't had employment during that time, then he seriously has to look at his working pattern, his approach or his ideas because something is not right.

Put it this way, if he isn't writing an average of about 400 words a day, then he will never finish anything. If he goes back and constantly revises those 400 words, he's never going to finish anything. He's just living a romantic notion of "being a writer".

A lot of the problem is that many would-be writers do not actually realise that fiction writing is a craft, rather than an "art". You have to learn how to create something by doing it and screwing up; it's not just a question of sitting there waiting for the muse to strike ... because she rarely will. You have to put the hours in and figure out how to construct a novel properly in the same way you'd have to learn how how to plane wood or cut a dovetail joint if you wanted to make a table.

I suspect part of the problem is that he's trapped in a cycle of procrastination because he wants to be a writer, but now has huge anxieties over what and when he produces or does not produce because the investment he's now put into the notion of being a certain type of writer is fairly high. It's the classic Reardon in New Grub Street scenario.

The MA may help in terms of setting him some hard deadlines though, but he really doesn't need it. I think MAs in creative writing are useful if you need constructive and honest feedback on your work or you need someone to recommend you to an agent; they don't necessarily help you write a novel because they don't tend to teach creative writing from the core "craft"/technical perspective.

Interesting perspective on creative writing there.

Very informative and interesting post, Oakum.

Oh Oakum, I don't have your level of experience but you're absolutely right and expressed it perfectly (all those years of doing it!). I didn't start getting any success until I realised I couldn't hone and craft and perfect every word and to a certain extent I had to start churning....because so little of what I submitted would be accepted anywhere anyway that I just didn't have time to be too artsy and precious.

I'm not saying I submit slapdash work, but I do make sure I PRODUCE....and while a lot of it is shit, some of it is salvageable and has had a degree of success. And the more I write, the better I get at it. It's almost as though practise makes perfect, and yet it took me so long to realise that writing does need PRACTISE.

A dancer or singer will train for years for the skills needed for one five minute number. Writing is similar!

oak so true.

When I explain to anyone the sheer amount of hours I put into my work they're all .

I would love to see the OP's OH's body of work because he's been writing for ages. It must be immense.

Agree Oakum, he's massively procrastinating and stuck in the analysis/paralysis trap.

Therapy could be helpful for unblocking him actually, hopefully he'll be amenable to it.

Wow. I could have written this. I urge you to have a serious conversation with your dh and stop enabling him. I am extremely resentful towards mine who I have financially carried for 13 years. I didn't want to put pressure on him while he studied and carried the weight of financial responsibility, family responsibility, house responsibility for all that time. He did nothing with his MA or PhD which were 8 years ago. It has pretty much broken our marriage. He had anxiety issues and health anxiety and instead of helping him become more resilient I enabled his behaviour to a point where I think the damage to us both is irreparable. You have a chance to sort this out for both your sakes, you are not doing him a favour. The best thing he can do is get a job, get some self respect and support you as from what I've read you are pretty much unsupported and have had to carry the weight of everything on your shoulders. Take this from someone who really understands how you got where you are.

Oakum that was so interesting to read as I know nothing about the craft of writing.

Thing is the £200 student finance is not an income is it? It's another debt he's bringing on the family finances!

He needs to get a small part time job at the very least because you cannot afford him not to...

Random - it is another debt but it's a personal one that won't become repayable until he earns over the threshold, which at this point seems vanishingly unlikely. But it does mean if he ever does, his income is going to get hammered repaying this loan, leaving OP to pick up the slack in terms of the family finances.

Oakum, very interesting post. What would you recommend as a way of teaching the craft?

Stephen King's "On Writing" is a good read for those interested in the craft.

Look, I think all writers and probably other creatives can relate to procrastination but this is ridiculous. You don't mull over ideas for months on end, you sit down and bash it out. Then re-craft, agonise, rework again then just get it done because deadline is a real thing.

And to add to my ha'porth, i took lots of authors out to events and everyone of them said that they spent today rewriting everything they wrote yesterday. ...

And the more I write, the better I get at it. It's almost as though practise makes perfect, and yet it took me so long to realise that writing does need PRACTISE.

Yep. You have to do your apprenticeship before you can become the writer craftsman you want to be. And that apprenticeship involves making a huge amount of mistakes and screw-ups. In my view, you just cannot buck this process. You have to make those mistakes.

Otherwise, it's like trying to make a Chippendale table with inlaid gold filigree, brass lions feet and a french polished finish when you've no experience of using a screwdriver.

As you may be able to tell, this subject is one of my hobby-horses. I really despair of the cultural loss we must have every year, purely because people, who would be excellent story creators and writers, do not know how to make their literary hopes into viable realities ~ usually because they believe in various myths about writing, novels and story.

Sorry about that triple post. My internet went weird. I've reported it.

"The kids would be DEVASTATED if we split up as were are both hands on parents. Also it would make out financial situation worse (in the short term at least). DH would also want full custody of the DCs and as he is the SAHP I'm guessing I would be relegated to weekends"

Do you really think they would be devastated; I do not think they would be as so called "devastated" as you think they would be.

How is he a hands on parent exactly?. Your 12 year old daughter does some cooking when he is at home. Re them he also uses the argument that, " the DCs will be upset if he goes out to work and DS has to do after school club". Honestly this man is in this only for his own self.

You need legal advice because the last part of your comment here is mere supposition; you are not writing from any knowledge gained from a Solicitor.

Lazy piss taking manchild cocklodger. You and your DC deserve better. I couldn't like ,love or be sexually attracted to someone with so little respect for himself and his family. I would LTB.

Another thing with writers - there are a fair few who make a small/moderate income by turning out very generic work. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you can write what is essentially the same book over and over again (in a popular genre) and especially if you can move to the next popular genre, you will do OK and enjoy yourself.
If you have something really important that you want to say (doesn't matter if it isn't the most original thing in the world) then you might attract some attention and therefore some money.
If you have an interest in writing and some aptitude for it along with some unusual/very specialised knowledge you might attract attention and money.

However if you just want to Be A Writer but have no idea what to write about, except that it will be Really Important and Special when you finally do it, you are a failure.

I would also add that making a living as a writer is largely out of our control.

All we can do is produce the best work we can as professionally as possible.
After that, the wheels turn without us. Will the publisher put any resources behind a book? Will the book buyers fancy it? Will the supermarkets take it? Will Amazon agree a good deal? These things are all outside the writer's sphere of influence.

PsychedelicSheep I know exactly what you mean! That's actually one of my favourite books. DH is perhaps not quite so haphazard and indignant but I can definitely see what you're getting at.

RunRabbit I have actually considered starting a diary like that in case anything happens. I should have started while I've been off in the school holidays and I've been around more - dammit.

tribpot It's really helpful to get a perspective from someone whose DH is definitely too ill to work. Yes my retraining was agreed - my drop in income while noticeable would have been more manageable if it was for 3 years as I'd expected not at least 5 now DH is doing further study. I honestly expected him to be working by now. I was even wondering how the dynamics of our relationship might change if he started to earn more that me. I needn't have worried about that!

It's also been fascinating to get a real insight into writing as a profession and see how precarious is it and just how much hard work is needed. I really don't think DH has the self discipline for it at all.

GetAHaircut.. Yes that's what I've gently tried to get across to DH. That someone could be the best writer in the world and still never make any money because they never get their lucky break.

flutterby77 Your post is like looking into a mirror. DH gets the health anxiety thing too - any niggle is a heart attack - he's always tired/ill - everything is a drag. He will blame me for bringing infections home from school even though I don't get ill myself .

Maybe I should just keep pushing (nagging?) about work and if it all explodes then so be it. I think I am scared of splitting up as it will have meant I've failed. We actually argued about something else yesterday and DH threatened to go to his parents. I panicked in the moment but looking maybe I should have said 'Off you go then.'

I need to look into possible outcomes if we do split - can't afford legal advice though.