Anyone biding their time till kids grown up before leaving or splitting up?

[Overseasmom100]

Just wondering if anyone's got plans to leave their DH once kids have left school and settled etc.

he hates confrontation, hates discussing matters, hides it all away, sweeps it under the carpet, Mr wonderful to everyone else but just a disappointment to me.

I can so relate to all of this paragraph @overseasmom100

Nobody has a clue how I'm feeling or what's going on in my head. Everyone thinks DH is perfect.

I honestly don't know how people do this. I've been thinking about going for years and even gone to look at places to rent but despite having an ok wage I would be really stretched to pay for rent on a 2 bed place. I would also have to pay for furniture. I was looking at several thousand just to get set up. And what would happen to the mortgage? I don't want to miss out owning my own home again. And that's even before considering the emotional impact on kids.

I am completely emotionally detached from my OH but as so many have said, finances are such an issue. Due to a couple of disasters I am in debt up to my eyeballs and working my way through a debt management plan. What with loosing my second income due to covid I dont have a cat in hells chance of getting out of this anytime soon. My kids are 7 and 11 and OH has plenty of money and frequently treats himself and the kids to extravagent things whilst I trail the charity shops for a second hand coat as I cannot afford new. It is gutting that it is all about money but the kids would have nothing if I suggested seperating. They would opt to live with their Dad I am sure

I was surprised at how much I could borrow for a mortgage @richtea12 don't write off leaving before doing your homework.
If the house was sold, how much would you come out with for a deposit?
How much could you get in tax credits?
How much maintenance would you get?
How could you increase your own income?

I work very part-time, but I've done plenty of research on what I would get financially when we split and I've worked out that even before increasing my income, I can afford a mortgage on a 2 bed terraced.
I never would have imagined this.

Could you keep the family home and DH leave?

One step at a time.

I explained my intentions to DH 6 months ago and told him what I needed from him to avoid separation. We agreed a time frame. After the time frame we discussed how the changes hadn't come about and what I needed from him next, which is to move out so that I can get paid tax credits for 6 months, these can then count towards my income which puts me in a better place for a mortgage. I've been open about all of this. He luckily has somewhere to go and stay for this 6 months to happen, I dont. After the 6 months, the house will go up for sale. We have even agreed out custody days in advance.

My DH is reasonable at the moment but that could change. I think me being honest with him and open that the relationship is failing means he hasn't been caught by any surprises along the way. We've a long way to go but, we have a plan.

Mine will be moving out when he's received his covid vaccine, which looks to be atound 3 months away (his GP is predicting).

I think it's a strange burden to put on your children. They get to adulthood or leave for uni, and suddenly there's no family home to go back to and their understanding of their parents' relationship was a lie and a farce, and it was all apparently for their sakes .

You sort of can’t win.
If you split when they’re young you ruin their childhood. If you wait until they leave it’s all been a lie.

Based on my own situation, the younger children are, the better they deal with it, so if your focus is on the children, younger is preferable.

My own parents have stayed together and they’re miserable. They’re staying out now and we just have to deal with the bad atmosphere and tension.

My Dad waited til i was about to leave for uni. It wasnt good timing. First the teen years were awful. Then actually i really needed to be able to go home but it didnt exist anymore. I think that feeling of not having a home made me leave and get a full time job so i could make myself feel secure. It was so strange as i had literally worked my arse off getting good qualifications and working in a shop for 20 hours a week to have a savings pot. I had dreamed about being a student. But the buzz just vanished and o left and got a job instead.
I dont know there is ever a good time for the children - so you may as well do it at the best time for you.

I think if you go then stay single. I know some adult kids say that they wish their parents hadn’t stayed together “for them” but they haven’t experienced the other side.

My mother decided after splitting with my dad to lurch into one relationship disaster after another so as a teenage girl I witnessed a lot of stuff I shouldn’t have witnessed. It’s not a great outcome whichever one they choose if you just end up going down the dating route as so many do!

My advice wound be to STAY SINGLE if split or at least be discreet when the kids are at their dads!

Kids don’t want to see men coming and going to shag their mother!

I agree a lot with your post @noshandpecs My parents stayed together until I left home. Then it became obvious what I would have gone through had they separated when I was younger. My mother would have gone from one relationship to the next without a doubt. Living with my alcohol dependent father was the better outcome of the two.
I'm about to separate from my own DH, but I've been in therapy for a long time to sort out my own self esteem prior to separation. I'm hoping not to stay single forever, but certainly for a few years to ensure some stability for my children.

@iyiyi "I needed to go home but that home wasn't there anymore" this happened to me too. Parents separated just after I finished uni, I was renting with a friend. They separated, friend went back home and I had nowhere to go and couldn't afford the rent. I had to move in with my grandparents. My next relationship probably moved too quicky as a result, before I knew it, I'd moved in with him, married and had 2 kids. Now plotting my way out.

I'd argue that waiting until kids start uni is probably worse. That's when they need the stability of home to help them set up their own.

But it's not an inevitable choice between sticking out a shit marriage or lurching from unsuitable man to the next, exposing your child to who knows what. The latter is rubbish decision-making & parenting by the mother. But it doesn't mean sticking out the marriage would have been the right thing - the right thing would have been for her to be sensible about her lovelife once she was single.

It's all a matter of how things are handled. If you can achieve as amicable a divorce as possible, and do right by your children as a single parent, then that's a better outcome than staying in a crap marriage demonstrating how to live miserably.

I am in this situation. Hearing views on here from a child's point of view makes me feel even worse and that I'll be trapped forever.
My reasons for staying....

1. Financial. We have a nice life. If we split I would be penniless and this would affect the children.
2. I don't want to have to share custody of my kids and be away from them
3. I don't want my kids to have a step parent when they are young.
4. If we split, my husband would make life hard for me out of spite.

I want to wait until the kids are teenagers /adults because...

1. They will be a lot more independent then and won't need me as much.
2. I will be able to go back to work and earn my own money to support myself (currently forced to be a sahm by my husband)
3. I will have been able to have spent 100% of my kids childhood with them rather than not knowing what they are doing when they are with their dad.

Reading on this post about how the child feels if their parents split when they are older really scares me, but I do understand. It is true that their parent has obviously been yearning to leave for years. Which must be difficult to think about. But they need to understand that their parent didnt want to leave them. Just their partner. That a parent makes many sacrifices for their children. Including their own happiness.

I hope this doesn't happen to me, but if my children feel this way about me then so be it I'm afraid. I cannot face a life time of being stuck with someone I don't love and I absolutely hate living with.
The only thing that keeps me going is enjoying my children and the fantasy that I can one day leave and have my own life when my child rearing days are over.

JKW36 - sorry, I don’t want it to look like I’m jumping on what you’ve said but I am making reference to it - just because it makes explicit what quite a few people have implied, about waiting because teenagers need you less than younger children - just because I want to comment on it based on my own experience of having a teenager, not because I’m criticising or trying to undermine your own viewpoint. I personally have found that my 14 year old needs me more in a way than when he was younger, and certainly needs more active and considered parenting than when he was 6 and parenting was more about caring and nurturing. Ok, he can come home from school and make his own food, etc, he is more independent in many ways, but he needs more emotional caring than physical. Imagining going through the breakup now, rather than when he was 8, is not nice to contemplate. Yes, you can better explain things to a teenager - but they are much more likely to also question, challenge, and take their own often irrational positions on things.

@Iyiyi I totally understand. I think it's very important to judge how it would affect your child at that given time.
My mum separated from her first husband and my sister was 6. (I wasnt born). My mum left and went back to her parents. My sisters dad got main custody and filled her head with lots of terrible untrue things about my mum. Forty, nearly 50 years have passed now and my sister is estranged from our family as she has always hated my mum for leaving her as a child. My mum missed out on so much of her daughters childhood because of the arsehole that she married, and has paid for it for the rest of her life.
I want to be with my kids during their childhood. I hope that we can help them to become strong, independent adults, who will understand that our job was to raise them and we chose to do it together. We are entitled to have our own lives once our kids are grown.

Look there’s never a good time for parents to split, that goes without saying. It’s not the ideal. All you can do is damage limitation. If you can contemplate getting through the years with civility and more good times than bad, then end it with an amicable divorce in which older DCs’ need for a base to launch from is central, stick it out. If there is a terrible atmosphere, fights, cheating, deep unhappiness, such that actually DCs’ needs are being neglected, wrap it up ASAP.

I did the former and my DC are fine, i think we modelled endurance and commitment to them even though our relationship did not make us happy as individuals. But actually it was only three years where we both knew there was no hope yet agreed to stagger on to the finishing line (end of DD3’s first year of uni). A longer time than that would have been impossible I fear.

I think the key message, having been a grown up child of divorcing parents and suffered consequences of that and seen the consequences of what life would have been like had they have separated when I was younger, is that both parents need to navigate separation in a stable way. Seek to heal your self esteem, put your children first, keep the separation as civil as possible.
Perhaps their age doesn't matter? It's more to do with how the separation is handled.

@JKW36 - that’s so sad for your mum and sister. It’s so difficult once you have children and find yourself in these situations- it’s like being stuck inside an egg, you feel like anything you do will be damaging. You do just have to make the best choice for your circumstances.

@Iyiyi yes I suppose her experience has scared me, even though I know her experience is quite unusual.

JKW36

I have made the same decision as you. I feel guilty because dcs aren't witnessing a good relationship (but not necessarily an awful one). I work hard to keep things civil when I feel really angry with something that my husband has done where I lost a lot of respect for him. I don't want to be parted from my dc either and yes, there are financial reasons too. I envisage trying to build more of a life for myself outside of the home (sahm, youngest will start pre-school soon). I want to develop hobbies and hopefully meet some like-minded people and feel I have a bit of companionship in life. It doesn't help that I have low self esteem and anxiety - I have been working on myself a lot lately - trying to be kind to myself and this has been a revelation having grown up in an abusive household (where my parents didn't get on and it really showed, it was really, really obvious). The worst aspect for me, is that I feel incredibly lonely now. Avoidance is a big thing most probably because I don't want there to be any arguments but we need to do more as a family - hopefully some picnics when the weather gets better - I don't want it to become really obvious to the dc. I don't have any extended family and no-one would guess from the outside. I feel sad a lot as well as angry but I've told myself I've got to make the best of it. Also awaiting counselling. I feel like I need to talk, talk, talk. I spend ages on mumsnet and tinkering with a hobby whilst my husband watches TV in the evenings, it's the norm now. If others have been through this, how did you make the best of things?

The handling of either scenario - staying or leaving - is obviously key. There are a million ways to operate a marriage, parenting and household when there is ambivalence in the relationship. My parents were in an unhappy marriage and did not separate (culturally it would have been impossible anyway) and whilst it wasn’t great to witness it would have been utter chaos if they had split. Going between two homes, the likely badmouthing. Also my mum was very detached and without my dad loving on us like he did I’m not sure I would have the self-esteem I needed to pursue a successful life. For my own part, I have growing ambivalence and resentment in my own marriage but it’s more complicated than just recreating my parents dynamic. Our shared goal is raising our children in a stable, loving home. It’s the most important thing for both of us. And if that leaves nothing left for the entity of us as a couple when they are older, then so be it. We can split and explain to our kids that we were happy and a team when we were raising them, and then that changed. If kids are so smart and switched on how would they not be able to understand that relationships are nuanced and actually not everything is about them all the time. If there is abuse and children witness it of course that can then lead to questioning when they are older if a split didn’t happen, but parents can have an internal life and make future plans and the kids will just have to deal. But of course, handling with respect and care is the minimum requirement for not messing up your children whatever the age and whether you stay for their benefit or leave for thier benefit.

Many years ago a friend of mine's parents did this. They waited until her younger brother finished his A'levels & then split. She, her brother & sister were devastated & felt guilty that parents had stayed together, but must have been miserable for so long in order to keep up the appearance of a marriage for the sake of the children.

But did your friends parents not explain that divorce is completely normal/common and that it was their decision and they were happy with it? Did they openly say they were miserable the whole time if not why would the kids assume that? People can be happy-ish and then not at all happy and decide they have reached a point of amicable divorce. It’s not going to ruin the lives of young adults who have already been raised by two healthy loving parents (caveat abuse etc etc) and have thier whole life to get on with. Upset temporarily sure, but would they have rather been ferried between two houses as children and financially insecure? Seems much worse to me.