After a long marriage we’ve just had a wonderful and much longed for baby so the stakes are high for me anyway.
DH and I have muddled along for years, mainly because I have got used to his ways. I’ve lived with him longer than I lived with my family, I’m conditioned to him to a large extent. He has never and I don’t think he would ever hit me. But he is volatile, I describe him as a hot head. He is like a loud hailer when he’s angry ‘rah, rah, rah’ for however long and then it feels like it’s all out of his system and unloaded onto me and he wants to carry on as normal afterwards expecting me to do the same. No problems get resolved and then the cycle just continues until the next argument in a few days or weeks time. Our communication styles are polar opposites. I would like to resolve things calmly and he is incapable of doing this.
Today’s ‘argument’ was all because I hadn’t put his clean T-shirt’s in the drawer ready for him to put on. The other day he was ‘brewing’ because he was running low on pants and had no balled up socks. Pants and socks just hadn’t made it up to their designated places. You get the gist, most of it in his world is because I haven’t done my wifely duties. Instead I’ve been focusing all of my attention on our baby and getting my head straight after a bad bout of post natal anxiety. Of course you are only hearing my side so it’s all mostly one way. He is a good man in general, he really is otherwise I wouldn’t have stayed all these years and I would never have had a baby with him.
But this morning it was the second of 2 recent nasty arguments. I was downstairs with the baby. I’m on mat leave and quite happily and understandably caring for her almost 24/7. Last night she went off to sleep around 2am and I was too tired to go upstairs with her and so she went to sleep in her crib downstairs and I flaked out on the sofa next to her. DH came downstairs at 5am in a mood saying he had no T-shirt’s and this is ridiculous. (There we’re loads in a pile downstairs I just hadn’t got around to taking them up). He started having a go saying he understands the baby takes up most of my time and he’s not jealous he just wants the basics done around the house. He didn’t care that I’d had about 3 hours sleep or think to ask if the baby or me were okay. It was just all about him as per usual. It got heated and he said something like you ‘fucking bitch’ which is one of the things he’s started saying to me since the baby has been born which I hate. I told him to piss off which I know is not good either. I just couldn’t face another one of these arguments and listening to his nastiness.
The previous nasty argument was about how much time his hobby/side business takes away time from our family and he is obsessed with it. That time he was angry yet again and said ‘my hobby made me x amount of money last year so tell that to your shrink’. He is referring to my counsellor who I recently started speaking to due to the PNA. He did apologise for that afterwards but the damage was done.
So basically here we are again. I’ve had the big talks with him saying this is no way for us or our baby to live, if things don’t change we might as well separate, etc, etc. A week goes by and we’re back to the same old same old.
I have often said I feel like taking our baby away for a few nights to get away from him. I’ve never done it. But I feel very much like doing that tonight so that I actually follow through with it. It would give me a break from him and maybe give him some time to think about what it would be like without us. I would leave him a note saying our baby is safe but I wouldn’t tell him where we were going.
Do you think this would achieve anything? I just don’t know whether it’s worth wasting money I don’t have. But if I don’t do it how is anything going to change? Our baby is my top priority and I don’t want her to grow up in a house of atmospheres and arguments. I lived like that as a kid, my parents loved us but were simply incompatible and it was not good.
He really isn’t the marriage counselling type, we’ve talked about it before and it’s pointless if he won’t engage. He often says he’s set in his ways and is too old to change now but where does that leave things? I’m sick of this attitude.
I’m off to catch a bit more sleep whilst our baby is napping so I will come back to this thread later. Thank you for taking the time to read this.