Sensible advice needed!
I am getting increasingly angry and frustrated at my husbands behaviour. I need to do something drastic to shock him into realising how he is acting is wrong without disrupting life for our daughter.
We have been together for almost 10 years and married for almost 2. Unfortunately we all suffered an extremely traumatic event in which we lost our baby boy while I was 21 weeks pregnant to Edwards syndrome while our daughter was 4 years old. It will be coming up to 3 years since this happened and this loss is still very raw for both of us. It has hit my husband hard particularly because he lost a son.
However we have both dealt with this is very different ways. I forced myself to continue through my pain and finish off my college degree and I am now in a full time job which I love. However this is not a huge wage so in reality we need two incomes to manage through each money, paying the bills etc and this is where the bulk of my income goes.
My husband on the other hand states social anxiety and cannot hold a job down as what he is qualified in is “too stressful”. But it’s a double edged sword as he states he cannot do the job he is qualified to do but he turns his nose up at any other “normal” jobs. He has been unemployed for a year now constantly reassuring me that he is looking for work and making excuses why he can’t do certain jobs. It’s getting beyond a joke now as it seems clear to me now that he has no intention of working.
In some ways it’s great as he can take care of at home tasks such as the housework, making the dinners and childcare. My biggest issue is that he has taken up drinking in a bad way since our loss and he uses the money I’ve worked hard for to do it. He essentially harasses me in earshot of our daughter to give him money “for a couple of beers” and ends up pooling money meant for food shopping for several bottles of wine and whatever he’s bought has been polished off in an evening. This is worse at weekends but can happen during the week when there is football on. He uses the fact that I don’t want to cause a scene in front of our daughter (who is now 6 so is not unaware of stuff talked about) and will keep going on and on until I give transfer him money. I realise this is enabling him to continue acting the way he is but it’s just so difficult when I am tired after working and being constantly hounded.
Everytime a drinking session gets bad I crack and threaten to leave him but he pulls the charm offensive and insists he will never do it again but it’s a never ending cycle and it’s changing my feelings towards him in a massive way. I still care for him but I am very unhappy with how my life is going. I am sick fed up of working hard and him just being a lazy unmotivated individual who refuses to work. We are often left with my wage wiped out mid month and it’s down to me to do extra jobs and car boot sales to earn extra income just so we can scrape through each month. It’s a real struggle and he does nothing to relieve it.
I live far away from my own family but my mother in law (who is equally disgusted at his behaviour as me) has offered for me to stay at hers with our daughter (he would refuse to leave our council rented house and if I threw him out he would only manage to wriggle some speech out at how much he has changed). I just don’t know what to do I am mentally and physically exhausted with this relationship and I don’t know how to give him a complete wake up call without totally disrupting mine and my daughters life. He should be the one to leave if he wants to continue a life of drinking and no job but it would be impossible to get him out the house. I guess a part of me also worries about what would happen to him as he clearly has mental issues. I want to help him but I just cannot do so without having completely detrimental effects on my own health. I’m just tired of the whole thing.