I want to leave DH but despite me being unhappy for 17 years my mum is pushing hard for me to stay because of the dc. And probably because she doesn’t want the shame of a divorced child.
She said I chose to have the dc, now it doesn’t matter if I’m happy or not. I’m really struggling. I wake in the morning feeling like I cannot breathe. My heart is racing. I’m not sleeping well, waking about 4am, and I’m not eating.
My mum keeps telling me how heartbroken the dc will be, that I will be poor, that I could lose them 50% of the time and they would hate that. That I will have no time nor money to do anything with them. That I will still be unhappy because my dc will be so unhappy.
Her answer? I wait another 13 years for dc2 to be 18. In 13 years I will be 50 and so worn down that I will have given up, if I make it that far which is debatable tbh.
We’d have to go and stay with my parents if I left DH so there’s no way of avoiding her. I hear what she’s saying and I suppose she is right. It is deeply selfish not to stay for the dc, who are happy, doing well at school and generally very settled.
I married DH partly because she wanted me to and I was young. Have I got to pay for that decision forever? It seems I have.
I cannot see a way forwards anymore. I just feel trapped. DH is slightly controlling and I am squashed, I am not who I was when we married. I was 20. He was 30. I feel I’ve changed so much and I feel this awful disconnect all the time. My mum says it’s because of covid but I felt it before that, although covid hasn’t helped.
DH isn’t a very involved father currently and never has been. All of the mental load falls on me and most of the practical stuff too. Currently he has them on his own one evening a week when I go out but only after I’ve got youngest dc to bed. Oldest dc is 11 and so not as demanding. He’s never willingly taken any of it on and he’s watched me struggle with things like the fact dc1 didn’t sleep through until he was 4 and he never once gave me a night off. It’s always ‘they settle better for you.’
He works hard, he has a good job, he does love me and the dc but I consistently feel like a thing on his checklist of what he needs for a ‘perfect’ life. I don’t feel like a person in my own right. He says the right things, for example I’ve taken a more demanding role at work with more hours and he did a lot of ‘ill support you whatever you want to do’ before I accepted. I started four months ago and in that four months he’s not practically helped me with anything. He’s not done a single school run, he’s not done anything in the house. I run my day around the children, working through lunch, rushing around, fetching them, coming back and doing another hour or so at work. Everything falls on me. I had a small crying breakdown about two months ago and he said he’d help me but nothing has changed although we now get take out or eat out once a week so I don’t have to cook.
I’m no longer attracted to him and so rarely have sex unless there’s no other option to. But it is rare. Two years and counting.
My mum says so what. If I left him I would be doing it all on my own anyway, plus the dc would be upset, plus I would be poor, she thinks it would all be worse and maybe she is right. I feel so trapped and it makes me feel like giving up. I just want to go to bed and never get back up again. I am already on antidepressants. I want to get back to a place where I feel like me again and I don’t know how to do that. I do know it hasn’t always been as awful as this with DH, I think since dc2 was born and I had PND it’s got much much worse. Mainly because he carried on totally as normal and I was barely functioning. Again he didn’t ever give me a lie in or get up at night when they were a baby. The PND hit me like a brick and I will admit since then I’ve never felt well, I’ve always felt a background level of anxiety. I can think of maybe two or three occasions since I had dc2 five years ago where I’ve not felt anxious. Unfortunately it arrived when she did, like an unwelcome additional child.
My mum thinks that’s why I don’t want to be with DH, that I’ve not recovered from the birth of dc2. I can’t imagine now ever being the person I was before I had her. I cannot imagine ever feeling optimistic or happy or even just less anxious. I get up in the mornings and wait to go back to bed. The best time of my life is when I am asleep. I just struggle through the days putting a brave face on it. I am incredibly lonely.
I love my dc so much. I don’t want to transfer this awful feeling to them. I worry that in breaking their family I will break them. I worry that my mum is right, that I am not capable of managing this. My mum never thinks I am capable of anything. When I went for this job she told me I wouldn’t cope, my children would suffer with me working more hours and I was putting my job in front of them. I spent four years as a sahp after dc2. I work my hours around them as best I can. I do everything I can to mitigate any cost to them - and yet DH just gets to do whatever he wants.
Sorry that was really long. I’m feeling desperate this morning.