@Chickencuddle
Do abusers stop there behaviour for long periods of time. Because it's been almost a year since I left briefly which makes me feel like he didn't know and now he does he isn't doing it anymore.
I haven't read all your previous posts, OP, but enough to know that your husband is a very sick man.
Given the childhood you had, you probably have no idea what a loving relationship looks like, and maybe you're used to adapting to grim situations by being selective in what you notice and remember.
You keep mentioning the "good man" who puts in an appearance, sometimes briefly, sometimes for longer. It reminds me of the crone/girl illusion picture (above) -- depending how you look at it, sometimes you see a sad, beaky-nosed old woman gazing down, sometimes the crone's eye becomes the ear of a pretty young girl with her cheek turned away. It seems to me that your whole vision of your husband alternates like this between monster and hero.
And of course, life is much more bearable if you can just focus on the hero vision and get it to remain stable for long enough to consider it real and solid. How you long for this, more than anything in the world!
The trouble is that your husband does just enough to trick you and keep you trapped. He doesn't have to do much, because you are conditioned to minimise your own feelings and ideas, and you are also inclined to overlook/forget unpleasant things that have happened. So as long as he can sustain a bit of more normal/pleasant behaviour now and then, it's enough for you to focus on the "hero" image rather than the "monster" you prefer not to see.
I don't blame you for not wanting to see the monster, because it is fucking scary.
Your efforts to subdue his deranged behaviour are wasted -- it's like trying to nail shut a crate of slime. You somehow manage to hammer home, eventually, that A, B, and C are not acceptable; he stops those specific things for a while, perhaps even for longer than you expected, but you're still wondering when it might all start again. In the meantime his sickness-slime seeps through all the cracks between the nails. I'm not sure I understand your post just now about the way he is making pronouncements to the kids about boundaries, but it sounds as though perhaps he is sarcastically mocking the principles he is currently paying lip service to, as a way of subtly undermining them.
He might have stopped doing the most obvious things to abuse you, but I'm pretty sure if I were a fly on the wall I'd see him constantly putting you down in hundreds of ways, making you doubt everything. You probably don't even notice because it seems normal to you.
Even reading between the lines of "makes me feel like he didn't know and now he does he isn't doing it anymore" ... I'm guessing this reflects conversations where he's turned everything back on you, as though you just haven't made yourself clear and he has always responded perfectly reasonably to your requests. He's probably very clever at making you feel this way.
I can't help feeling sceptical when you say how happy the kids are. I suspect they have often pretended to be asleep, pretended not to see or hear something. The way he rants at them, and how you contain situations by deferring to him, does not sound like a happy or healthy dynamic. As PPs have said, his sexual behaviour around them is deeply disturbing.
The thing about the hero/monster illusion is that you're not sure which to believe in. They both seem equally plausible to you. How can you tell which is real?
In answer to your question:
Do abusers stop their behaviour for long periods of time?
Abusers can certainly pretend to be good people. It's all part of their game. I suspect his abuse just keeps changing form, shapeshifting so that you can never quite pin it down. Pay attention to those uneasy feelings.
A more useful question to ask might be:
Do good men ever act abusively?
The answer is simple: NO. NEVER.
A good man is never a monster. Not even for a day or two. And a quick glance at your previous threads reveals a hefty catalogue of truly vile abuse.
This is not love, OP, and it's no future for you or the kids. I hope you'll find the strength to leave again and give it a proper chance this time.