I'm struggling with my husband because he shouts so much. He's nice when we have people over but he becomes very irritable when we are alone as a family. I struggle to have an adult conversation with him without him shouting at me. He appears to be incapable of listening until things are too late. I left him a number of years ago due to this behaviour and he begged me to take him back but has since broken every promise he made.
He shouts at our ADHD autistic child who can demonstrate difficult behaviours and shouts at me for not disciplining him. My husband also has ADHD. I prefer a more gentle approach to parenting that involves explaining why he can't do certain things and find that I get better results with it.
Things are worse when he smokes weed, something that I do not want our children exposed to. He says he will stop but then sometime later find the evidence. He becomes incapable of not loosing bank cards and keys. He will loose each of his cards one by one, then proceed to have to borrow mine loosing them all. He also absent mindedly takes all of the sets of keys to the front door to work. I will realise this when I can't open the front door to take the kids to school and have to leave through the back gate. He has on occasion also taken the back door keys too. He can make himself late for work because he can't recall where his keys are despite us having a designated place to keep them.
The spark has gone in our marriage. He is obsessed with porn and makes no effort to hide the evidence of what he is looking at. A great deal of it is in the barely legal category and the older we get the more creepy I find it. I do not feel jealous of those women, all I can see is young girls who don't look particularly happy who have been exploited for money. He expects instant gratification in the bedroom and if he does not get what he wants immediately he shouts at me and then shouts about how I don't find him attractive anymore. There feels to be so much pressure to perform in a certain way and very little thought to how pleasurable the experience is for me. He has also told me that he preferred having sex with his ex because she was more naughty than me. Intimacy to me is much more about wanting to feel the touch and closeness of somebody I feel a connection with, not somebody who shouts at me all the time and expects me to behave like a porn star. As a woman approaching 40 one of the last things that I would find arousing would be graphic imagery of a young boy who has just turned 18. He often makes excuses about how he is so tired and disappears off for elongated periods of time to relieve himself at the expense of spending time with the kids.
He also wants us to spend every weekend as three generations of family with his Mum and Dad. His mum is overbearing and is a constant source of unsolicited advice. Her demands for time with the children feel as though she is exercising a contact order rather than being invited to visit. They play blatant favourites with the children in favour of our child who carries a stronger resemblance of their family over the child who is more like my family. He shouts saying things like it's normal for families to spend time together. I have no desire to filed calls from his family demanding when their next overnight stay is and have to hand my kids over to them over week for sleepovers while my husband is at work. I have put my foot down and suggested that he takes them over for tea once a week while I get some other things done and makes sure he brings them back home again. Weekends once a month is not enough for him. He wants to spend nearly every weekend with them and do multiple family holidays a year with them and his sister all of whom have very difficult personality types and can be quite abrasive. There is an expectation that I will sit around with his mother and the kids absorbing her unsolicited parenting advice while he does an activity with his sister and Dad.
I am currently a stay at home mum which I am hoping will be able to change in the near future as my youngest is turning 3. The free childcare will open up more opportunities that will make returning to work viable. On Mother's Day he shouted at me that I do not contribute anything to anything. Apparently there is no value in looking after children and a constant battle to keep a home clean and tidy against the onslaught of mess created by the ADHD'ers. I was in the process of setting up a workshop that would enable me to set up a home business in the garage. He has filled it with so may "useful" things he has collected from the skip at work that I am unable to open the door and have not been able to step foot in there for 3 years. Every time I clean a room he comes home from work, sees an empty space and fills it with clutter than shouts at me that the house does not look perfect. I genuinely worry about how the housework would be done at all if we both worked full time as he finds organising things very difficult.
I feel as though I have lost my whole sense of self and have become an unappreciated servant. I just feel miserable. I know that the kids would be devastated if we were to separate, I just don't know what to do.