I have earnt my own money since I was 11, I have had both successful businesses and worked as an employee, often doing both at the same time. We moved over 80 miles away from everyone I've ever known 5 years ago whilst I was on maternity leave to a very rural area. I was planning on working in the local primary school once our youngest began nursery and my husband said that he would convert a small room into a working kitchen so that I could set up a small bakery. 11 months after moving we were involved in a car crash and I have been left with a lifelong disability. It's now over 5 years later and the small room is still not finished, plus I can't bake in the same way I once could, so I now require specialist equipment, which we can't afford and there is no funding for.
My dad died less than a year after the car crash and he was my only friend in the world. I'm autistic and working from home was always the long term plan when we moved, but without my husband completing what he started, I'm stuck. He leaves things all over the house and garden and I run around picking up after him, more than our children. I have issues sleeping and I have been sleeping on the sofa for 11 years. I usually lay on 'our' bed every Christmas Eve, so that the kids can see that Santa has been on Christmas morning, but last Christmas Eve my mum came and refused to leave the living room on Christmas Eve, so I had to stand in front of the door to stop them seeing her until she woke up and the Christmas Eve before, I slept on a wooden floor with three of our children because my husband had started ripping up floor boards in their bedroom in September and he still hadn't put new ones down by that point.
I'm stressed by mess, but if you saw our house, you wouldn't believe it. I spend every day cooking from scratch, home educating and cleaning and I'm exhausted. I wash, dry, iron and fold all my husband's clothes and all I ask of him is that he puts his own clothes away, like the adult he is, but when I go upstairs they're thrown on top of cupboards, on the floor or he'll throw them on the bed and kick them down the gap between the bed and the wall. We had lived here over four years before I could unpack my clothes out of the moving boxes, where everyone else's were put in drawers. We bought some drawers and I put my clothes in them and then when my husband ripped up the floorboards, everything was piled in front of them. I couldn't physically move them. In the last five years I have wore probably as many outfits. A couple of months after my dad died, I heard my husband joke to our teenage children that he doesn't have a sex life, because he's married to me. Firstly my Dad had just died, secondly; he's made 'our' bedroom into a hell hole that I can't breath in and lastly; I didn't feel it was appropriate to talk to our kids about that or demonstrate that I'm a joke. Upsettingly; they laughed! I don't have a friend in the world. My mother has made it clear that she wants nothing to do with me and I don't know where to turn.
I can't drive and buses in the area we live in are expensive - no day rovers or discounts. There are no shops for 15 miles and no employers other than farming for about the same distance. I want to do something that I could do from home, but all the work from home jobs seem to involve driving or going out and I have mobility issues. My husband knows I have these issues, but I'm doing more now that I did before and I've had as much as I can take. Every time he has a coffee, he gets a new cup and sticks the other in the sink. I went in the kitchen in the early hours of Saturday morning and saw everything he'd left me to deal with and I've just given up. I haven't done the pots or eaten since Friday until yesterday (Monday) when I ate some crisps. When I feed the kids, I've resorted to using paper plates, because it's all getting too much, which I absolutely hate to do.
I don't have a degree and I'm stuck for what I could do. Could somebody give me ideas of how I can get out of this situation please? I've asked him for a divorce many times over the last few years, but he just ignores me and maybe does the pots but then returns to normal. I don't love him. I resent him. Every time we've had money and I've wanted to learn to drive or start a degree, he has found a use to better himself. The fact that I'm 40 and I can't drive in such an isolated area is very restrictive.