Are there ways to ‘turn’ around your relationship when you’re just fed up? At what point do you think, I’m out of here or feel brave enough to take that step? I’m coming up to 30 and it feels like a massive time of change for me.
We were in a bad place around 2020 when DH and I had our first. He wasn’t allowed any paternity leave but just ignored it with work rather than exploring any options to at least get any period of time off. I ended up with PND as I found it so hard to manage moving home with a newborn and having the newborn all alone in covid times.
He was like a giant man child - would leave his clothes on the floor, tell me he had no money to buy me anything for my first birthday as a mum but donated money to a fundraiser for a friend instead, told me and better told me he would get a new job to make things better (his job had shifts all over the place, days, nights etc) but turned out he admitted he had no intention of doing so, found out he’d added his ex FWB from a work training course (before me) on a social media platform and would be doing things like saying he was going out for a couple of drinks, to then rolling in at 3am.
After some apparent ‘lightbulb’ and seeing how ill I was, he eventually agreed to change department within his job to slightly better shifts and started to make a prolonged effort at being so much better. We’ve just had our second this year after me finally thinking things were better and seeing it. Since we had our baby though, he seems to have gone backwards.
Getting so drunk he pushed me, was verbally abusive and left me on a rare evening out. I’ve recently been diagnosed with ADHD and since I have been, he’s been worse in doing or saying things that are difficult for me, despite me discussing with him countless times things that are triggering for me or I find difficult. He refuses to do any cleaning/ironing and will happily pass it to his dad to do rather than do it himself or he’ll start a room, and leave it unfinished, whilst I do multiple rooms, deep cleaned to myself.
I came up with the idea of a family diary for memos, appointments, even to remind us days we should meal plan for the week. I’ve populated that for months and he can barely even be bothered to check it. Currently there’s a huge pile of days worth of his worn clothes all over the spare bedroom floor that he’s been saying he’ll sort for days. He’s currently laid on the sofa monopolising the TV with football because he needs a relaxing evening after a job interview today.
I need to plan and action when the children need new clothes, meal ideas, appointments, laundry, making sure our eldest’s bag is sorted for pre-school - all of the household mental load. Meanwhile, if I forget to put a coat or a vest out for eldest for example, he will just blindly take him without one, without even thinking. He does cook and uses that as if he should win a medal.
I’ve been on SMP whilst on maternity and tonight he’s snapped at me because he bought a football club membership on my credit card (saying he’d pay me back) so I was querying how much he’d paid of it. We were also sorting out money he’d transferred me to buy some clothes for our baby. He lectured about how much more he’s been paying every month and he isn’t going to pay for anything that doesn’t benefit him so I need to pay him back for anything that’s owed and in the future we need to keep a note of it (marital money doesn’t exist in his world, we have to have financial independence and only the bills to be paid joint). I put one thing for me in the trolley today when shopping and he told me I’d have to start paying him back when I go back to full pay.
Sorry this is so long and rambling, I don’t have anyone else to talk to really. I sometimes wonder if everyone feels this misery and drudgery and that life really is this hard to juggle and plan, always chasing your tail and feeling like there’s 100+ tasks to do every day. Sometimes though, I start to think maybe it’s him that’s making everything harder and it would be easier alone.