Just need to share - no solution

[Witchesandwizards]

I met my kiwi husband 13 years ago in London, I am 48, he is 42 and we have two children, 10 and 7. We moved to NZ October 2019 against my wishes, but my husband always wanted to come back.

It was always an understanding that at some point we would move to NZ but this was decided before children, before my parents became frail and it kept getting put off as we built a successful and comfortable life in London with a close network of friends. I hoped that this would mean we didn’t have to move. By the time he decided we should move, I didn’t want to, but my husband held me to a ‘promise’ I had made 12 years earlier, and despite a lot of arguments, we set the wheels in motion and moved 6 months ago.

Immediately I felt homesick and suddenly realised that I had taken my life for granted, but emotionally I still felt in control and we threw ourselves into finding a house. And when we moved into that house, I looked forward to our container arriving and then it was Christmas. I spent 4 months either expecting things to improve or busy with the holidays. I still cried, we still had arguments, but nothing could prepare me for how I felt when the kids went back to school.

At the start of February it hit me like a ton of bricks that I have left most of my family and all my friends, my career, the home we renovated together, the city I love and my country of birth. It dawned that the rest of my life could be unhappy, living in a place I hate and don’t belong. At almost 50, I don’t really have much chance of building a life that is as fulfilling as my old one - I feel bereft and trapped. The best way I can describe it is that it feels like I’m in a coma and someone is trying to turn off my life support and however hard I try to yell, I can’t make them understand that I’m alive. I feel trapped in a nightmare - I have lost all control over my life. It’s a horror movie. I can’t even look back at last year and all the planning and believe I actually came. It’s a blur. I don’t know how I got on the plane.
Everything I do reminds me of an occasion, place or person from home. Hundreds of times a day. Music makes me sad, photos make me sad, social media makes me sad. I’ve always been the sort of person who can compartmentalise my problems, and still get up every day and find something to enjoy, putting a face on through hard times and still functioning well at work and socially. But now I only function for the children and nothing brings me joy. I have deserted my parents when they need me most, I argue and fight with my husband in front of the children, I don’t earn a living and I am horrible to live with.

Consequently, we are having terrible marriage problems - I’m not playing ball and embracing life as he wants me to, and he says I am negative. He is the classic extrovert and I am a natural introvert but with extrovert ‘cover’ when needed - he thinks I should socialise more to get out of my rut, find a job (after a 24 year career in advertising, I can’t get work for logistical/childcare reasons, age and now probably recession), and is pissed off that I don’t want to hang out with his family all the time (I don’t particularly get on with them). In return I have been absolutely vile to live with, lashing out (not physically) because I blame and resent him for my situation. He is now talking about separation but has said I can’t take the children home so I would have to stay here with 50% access, spending half my time alone in a country I never wanted to live in. I don’t know if I love him, I can’t see the wood for the trees.
I know I am depressed, but what good are anti-depressants, I need a time machine.

If you got this far thank you! There is nothing anyone can do to help but writing it down maybe helped. Or maybe not. 3.30am and I'm done x

And if hadn’t worked out, much easier to undo.

I know you wouldn’t do this but what would happen if you just got on a plane and left.

Would he be able to work and look after the children full time.
Would his mother be able to look after her husband and the children full time, doing the overnights when he is away.

Would it impinge on her drinking time or would he be coming home to children being supervised by a drunk.

Where would his fun dad persona go if he actually had to look after his children full time as well as hold down a job in the family firm or would one thing have to be let go.

His weekends away with his family would take on a different meaning with the responsibility of 2 young children

I reckon they would muddle through for a week or two, relying on screen time, pizzas, everyone mucking in, but not sustainable. I would imagine he would leave work early where possible, and MIL would fill in as necessary. They would probably stay at home unless DH was out, when they would go to ILs for sleepovers.
To be honest, despite her crassness, the drinking and the fact we don’t get on, she’s quite capable. She has my niece and nephew a lot. But FIL needs more and more care so I imagine stuff like mid-week evening sports activities will become very difficult for her.

If I got run over by a bus and it was long term, DH would have to find a new wife to look after him and the kids

If I got run over by a bus and it was long term, DH would have to find a new wife to look after him and the kids

You don’t need to get run over by a bus. Such entitled men who need to be “looked after” will already be lining someone else up. They can’t cope on their own. Mine was OLD the day he moved out of our home and was living with someone within 6 weeks. He will have a close network and be seen as a big fish in a small pond. Be ready for that one. I didn’t see it coming and it was torturous. You will be discarded and devalued within seconds - including his family and friends.

Note if there is a single old friend in the network - he will home in there.

How have things been today witchesandwizards?

@Gutterton always speaks so much sense. You’ve had some great advice op... you and kids deserve more. Rip the plaster off and take steps to leave

No old friends in the network - all still happily married and also socialising with each other. He will actually have to make quite an effort and be proactive to meet someone else here at his age.

@macaroniandpizza Still tip-toeing around each other. Not much communication - I have things I want to say, to ask him, to try and clarify but I am too scared. I generally email him while he's at work.

I heard yesterday from mutual UK friends who have been trying to mediate, that his main complaint (that he feels he can share from a PR POV) is that I am not making an effort. By that, he means I have been negative about NZ and refused to host dinner parties for his friends so I can get to know them better, or spend weekend after weekend with his family drinking. I emailed, pointing out that at home I wasn’t that sociable, preferring smaller, everyday interactions to nights out/entertaining and that my focus now is on survival, the kids, my mental health and supporting my parents.

I do know those friends, we saw them each time we came back, even camping with them for a week last time. While perfectly pleasant, I did not connect with them, and none of us kept up contact between visits. And re. his family, I saw my parents once or twice a month, and my brothers a couple of times a year so why would I suddenly want to spend so much time with someone else’s family?
When I talked about being unable to socialise because of the depression, he just said ‘but you know just what to say to the GP tomorrow’, implying I would lie to get a diagnosis. As if crying every day in your wardrobe, or weighing up the impact of a depressed parent for the rest of their lives vs the short sharp shock of a parental suicide is normal.

Who is Mr. Extrovert to think that his introverted, depressed, peri-menopausal wife will be happier surrounding herself with party people? But he just does not get logic. I cannot get through.
I’m thinking survival, he’s thinking parties.

I have a good friend at home who I lost contact with for a while and as such, she has met DH but doesn’t know him well (enough to be taken in by his charm). She writes extensively about relationships (women’s magazines and books) and is also Australian so gets the cultural nuances.

What (DH) means by saying ‘you don’t look after me any more’ is ‘instead of making me feel good about myself like you did in the UK, you are making me feel bad because – like you expressed in the UK – you had serious misgivings before the move to NZ. And your serious misgivings have turned out to be right’.

When people feel guilty they often turn it back on the person who – directly or indirectly – is making them feel guilty.

You know how when someone cuts you up in traffic? If you DARE to beep your horn, invariably the guilty party will act as if YOU are the aggressor and then they act even more aggressively in return.

Rather than hold their hands up and admit they were in the wrong, that age-old human defence mechanism kicks in. An old philosopher once said (in not so many words) that perpetrators have to defend their actions otherwise they have to feel the horrors of guilt and shame instead.

From what I hear, it’s clear that (DH) genuinely loved/loves you. Deep-down he knows he’s screwed up and should never have made such a life-changing move when his wife previously expressed major concerns.

He is guilty of being both thoughtless and selfish (a common male trait). He also strikes me as a natural-born optimist so actively chose to think of only the best outcomes not the worst.

Unfortunately for him, he didn’t take into account that the best outcomes for him mightn’t turn out to be the best outcomes for you. And that’s despite being warned by you and your cold feet in the run-up to the move from the UK to NZ.

He is possibly also feeling further guilt about the promise that you and he (and the kids) would be financially set up for life if you all made the move. Whether or not he knew the real truth before you set off to the other side of the world, he does know that you agreed to go under a rather gob-smacking false promise.

While (DH) should not be responsible for your happiness, he should not be responsible for your unhappiness either.

Her conclusion:
Anyway, my worry is that so long as (DH) is in the clutches of his mother/brother(s), he is not going to change. His family, for one, won’t allow it. It suits their purposes to have him close to them.

And until your dreaded/dreadful mother-in-law shuffles off this mortal coil, your daily domestic battles with DH won’t end. Been there, done that. Got the ‘Stay away from Mummy’s Boys’ t-shirt to prove it.

For (DH) to change his present situation would mean having to show loyalty to you over loyalty to his family. Plus, as mentioned many times above, he would then have to admit guilt/defeat.

What 'right-minded male' back in his original less-than enlightened NZ surrounds is going to do that?

Sorry, that's long.
Lockdown, no one to talk to.

I think she is right. I'm pretty sure it's going no where.

Last night I gave him a hug and told him I missed him.
I meant I missed the old him obviously.

His reply 'you have a funny way of showing it'.
He also told me to look at evil SIL's behaviour and compare mine as I am behaving like her. FFS. He just doesn't get it.

Ach. He doesn't WANT to get it.
As your friend wrote to you, he wants you to be the fault, to take the blame, because otherwise he has to share in it and he won't do that - it makes him uncomfortable and he's no intention of feeling that, so it will all get deflected back to you.
Standard when there's infidelity in a relationship too - it ALL becomes the cheated-on partner's fault, because that's the only way the cheater can absolve themselves of guilt.

Note: I'm not saying he's cheating, just it's a standard response to the guilt feeling.

But in a way he HAS cheated on you - just not with another woman. He's put his own and his family wants ahead of you and your needs, and how very dare you upset his fuzzy pink happy place with your real life requirements!

I don't honestly think there's any coming back from this because he's refusing to take any responsibility for the situation. Until he does, you're on a hiding into nothing unless you can completely subvert your own feelings and being and pretend for the rest of your life that you're "happy" - which is no way to live. :(

@ThumbWitchesAbroad
You are right and I know you are right. And if we were in the UK and this was happening he would be out like a shot. But the stakes are so bloody high, I keep wanting to see if it would ever work. If nothing else, nothing is going to happen quickly so I am trying to bide my time and work out a strategy.
Tomorrow's GP appointment is important both to by health, my 'armour' against the ILs and to document his drinking formally.

Does it make me petty to half look forward to turning round to MIL when she offers me a drink and saying 'Sorry, I can't drink because of my meds', subtext being 'that your son's behaviour drove me to'?

I have checked with the lawyer and anti depressants won't impact custody etc.

I have found some articles and a radio show about improving father's custody chances. Today's proactive activity is to research to enable me to defend.

You need to stop blaming yourself for everything - stop blaming the menopause and the depression for the mood in the house and start letting him be accountable for causing this too. His fucking mother has never let her babies be accountable, and this is why he is reverting to type.

Not wishing to denigrate your own feelings and emotions, OP, but we hear a lot about what he said to you, how you feel, but very little about what you said to him and how he feels. You loved him once, you gave tacit approval to the assured prospect of his returning to NZ. NZ has so much to offer young kids, despite the awfulness of lockdown just now. It's just far too soon to make a reasonable judgement on permanency. My daughter hated the move as a teenager, for about 18 months.

Not mentioning your friend could you almost spell out what she has said to him.

That he behaves as though everything is your fault when he knows deep down that you had misgivings when you were persuaded to get on the plane.
That all the promises of how set up you would be doing this move is based on a lie that his family told him or whether he knew or should have known because he should have checked before even thinking about making the move.

And him blaming you is just deflecting when he knows deep down he has played a major part in your unhappiness.

That he won’t know the true cost of coming to NZ until both his parents have passed and if they were still in charge of the company (if the company is still there) will he get anything or if there is anything left will 1/3 of what is left be worth it given he could end up losing his wife, his children and the roof over his head and end up living with his parents/mother for the next 15/20 years

I would ask him why he thinks you would be entertaining his friends when they really aren’t your friends.
What made him think that you were best buddies if you only saw them when you visited and didn’t talk to them or contact them unless he instigated it.

He has to live in the reality that he knows things aren’t right both with how he was promised, or promised you what was happening with the business and the fact he ignored all your questions and misgivings.

Great that he wants to put a happy face on things and thinks that enough alcohol and a few dinner parties will drown out the gathering clouds

Also I wouldn’t be too sure that he wouldn’t try it on with his friends wives to see who will bite if you were out of the picture.

Even for the most dowdy of men when they end up single they look round at the women in their lives before venturing out of their close knit pool.

*Posted too soon.
Menopause is there and it has genuine symptoms. Don't let them be HIS excuse for behaving like a turd.
Depression and PTSD are a REACTION to what you are going through. They are a logical response to the abuse you are being subjected to.
You are in an abusive relationship with a family of alcoholic, bloody disordered personalities who have no respect for you who are also clearly getting their ducks in a row to scapegoat you. Your DH is gaslighting you appallingly. Get legal advice and start to prepare the separation asap. I think if you could-shoulder him permanently and let him go to mummy's, he will be so drunk - he won't be suitable for the kids to hang out with. (If they drink that much, can you trust that they will be safe to drive your children on the weekend? I wouldn't!). You may find that you end up going home with your kids after all, as the kids get in the way of his lifestyle. He won't want to ferry them around to sporting events, etc. Just don't fall for any of his attempts to make you appear like the "crazy" one again.

I am very glad to read you have legal advice.

An alcoholic is not a good father. He is the antithesis of a loving, dad. His alcoholism will damage the children, even if they love him. Please keep that in mind if this gets to the point of negotiating custody.

@polyglot I think it's all buried in my post somewhere, but my dialogue with him as been pretty vile and I take responsibility for this - I have sworn at him, called him names, told him I hate him and that he has ruined my life. If it's any excuse, this ranting didn't come out of the blue, but after attempts to discuss how I was feeling in a much calmer and more objective way. He would never, ever accept my feelings, instead, he always got defensive and angry and then I would cry and get shouty. This stopped a few weeks ago - I am not going to let him wind me up any more. My feelings and opinions of my situation and of NZ are valid.

I would argue the 'greater opportunity' thing as a bit of a myth. Literally the only difference I have seen, and a problem for the numerous parents of none sporty kids I have spoken to, is that there is more opportunity for organised sports. And the level of commitment required, and huge emphasis put on competitiveness inevitably forces many kids out, especially as they get older. In the UK DC did a lot of extra curricular sport - rugby, tennis, soccer, modern dance, Krav Maga, swimming - so for us the sports are no improvement.
DD and her friends would rather go on Roblox than play out, and even at the beach house DC and their cousins have to be dragged away from devices to go outside.

And there is a huge problem with boredom for teens - at home my friends kids can go by themselves to the cinema, out for a burger, bowling from 13, 14. With no public transport they still rely on parents here. And as they get older this boredom contributes to the middle class alcohol and drug problem. BIL (LA) went to private boarding school and still ended up a P (meth) addict in his early 20s.

And the education system is just not as good, at least not up until high school. I have friends who are international teachers and they have confirmed this as has my ex maths teacher mum who has been looking at DCs work. And universities way down the international league table.
Someone described NZ to me as a low income, low population country and I think this actually reduces opportunity.

Oh, and not sure how he feels about anything else. The bigger picture.
Because ALL he talks about is the family / friends issue.

@justilou1 Yes, I think I am almost at the stage where I have to tell him to put his money where his mouth is and go home to mummy. He told me a couple of weeks ago that he was leaving after lockdown so that's only a week or two anyway.

Now the kids, DD especially, are so aware of the drinking thing, I will get told what happens when they are there. She told me the other day 'whenever I kiss (MIL) her breath always smells of wine'. FFS.

I wouldn't give mil any ammunition to use against you regarding your mental health.

@Oliversmumsarmy Thank you again for your brilliant support.
My friend's email would be the perfect starting point for conversation but he just won't listen/read properly and take in what things mean. He seems to be emotionally retarded and latches onto trivial comments rather than understanding the real point of things if that makes sense?
It's also winding him up that I'm even talking to people - 'that's what you always do, tell other people'.
So I pointed out that he has told people.
His response 'but they're my family'. That old chestnut.
'I choose to talk to friends rather than upset my family sooner than necessary'.

Unfortunately he's actually quite hot and looks about 10 years younger than he is, so once he makes an effort he will have no problem. To be honest, it might solve some of my problems - a 23 year old gf will distract him from child care

I have not read the full thread OK but if you can't travel to the UK without his permission, do it with his permission!

You need to suddenly feel a lot better. You need to finally be 'getting' NZ. You have to relax and start to enjoy it and pander to his every whim and really seem to be like the old you so he will allow the kids to get on a plane with you for a holiday back in the UK. Currently you are showing him your hand of cards. Stop this right now. You have to put on a RADA worthy performance with one goal and one goal only in mind and that is to get on that plane with the kids with his permission. Spend all your time getting evidence that he is a piece of shit int he background and treat it like a military exercise. Be cool and steely but don't blink. Once you are home, fight tooth and nail to stay. As PPs have said, he won't fight it. It would cost him a fortune and he doesn't sound the type to want to spend the money or go to the effort.

OP... I need to take issue a bit with you over the education comments. Are you sure that your friends and your mum are sufficiently well-informed about NZ for you to use their opinions on which to base your own? I've taught in a number of schools, in NZ and in the UK. Good and bad in both countries. The worst school ever was in a comprehensive in a depressed, grey northern town, where the kids had to share tattered texts and had given their 5 previous teachers a nervous breakdown. There were kids living between parents, neither of whom wanted them, and living out of 2 plastic carrier bags, neglected and starved children, several of whom wanted me to adopt them, drug-addicted kids...
The best (listed in Tatler's Good Schools Guide) were no better than the very good Auckland schools in which I have worked. Interestingly, the "best" private schools in Auckland seem to be largely staffed by Brits who have moved for a better life for their own kids. Kids with the right motivation and parental support will nearly always do well.
In my opinion, you need to focus not on the peripheries, but on the heart of the matter - your emotional state and your marriage. Your husband sounds like a right arse, and I know exactly the "type" of Jafa represented by your ILs. But as I said before, you loved him once, and you accepted that he wanted to return to NZ as one of the conditions of marriage. There is a very big cultural gap to bridge in any new homeland, and this requires some patience and tolerance. The emotional and hormonal issues are playing a massive part in your situation, and I can so sympathise with how you are affected. You certainly need time out from the present scenario. Good luck and keep talking-you have lots of sympathetic ears of people who have made the huge cultural leap and know what you are going through.

@pollyglot I apologise and completely accept that this is based on my observations and conversations with my new group of friends. But two of them had children educated in the UK previously and one was a TA in the UK and is now a TA here. From what I can gather there is no consistency of curriculum between schools either - one nearby intermediate that is not in our zone, teaches the IB, one doesn't, so kids living a street away are learning different things.

The intermediate that is in our zone has a reputation for concentrating on sports alone with very little kudos for academic work, and I have heard this from everyone I have spoken to about it -kiwis/English/SA/Chinese/Americans. It's just accepted as a thing.
I'm friends with a couple of the Chinese mums from school, and in our two hour Saturday morning tennis session, education is a hot topic, and they have told me that most of the Chinese community (50% of school) are happy with the education until year 2/3 but then they start tutoring most nights a week.

And may be we were lucky at home, great primary school (especially for our area of SW London that was still a bit rough round the edges) and we were in the catchment of an outstanding secondary school.

Whenever DD is asked of she likes school here she says 'yes, it's easy'.

All these things are important because DH also keeps saying he moved for the children. But I honestly don't see that argument has legs. I honestly can't see the advantage for them. Ok, cleaner air. That is the only benefit I can see.