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The original was posted on /r/twoxchromosomes by /u/Double_Rain_8909 on 2023-08-22 00:00:20.
My 20 year relationship has been falling apart for years. My husband has been increasingly verbally and emotionally abusive towards me and I have been gathering the strength to leave, this has been a long process as I am SAHM and pretty isolated.
A few weeks ago, after another of my husband’s unhinged outbursts, I promised my kids (4 & 6) that there would be no more moments like this.
The next day, I took the kids over to my parents and told then I wanted a divorce. My dad doesn’t say much but respected my decision. My mum kept telling me how marriages are hard work, made excuse after excuse for my husband, even when i described how he’d me in the past and I was scared of his anger.
After a night, I asked him to get out of the house so I could take the kids back. He came and stayed with my parents for the rest of the week, going for runs, out for beers after work and eating homecooked meals made by mother. Seriously, one night the kids facetimed him before bed and he sais I have to go, Grandma’s cooked me a delicious dinner.
So anyway, that made me feel like shit. We have to attend an out of town family wedding in a few weeks. Flights and accommodation already booked and paid for and he won’t consider pulling out. So after a week at my folks he came home and his trying ‘his hardest’ (ie. for once doing the bare minimim by walking away instead blowing up in front of the kids and I).
So I have this trip/wedding to get through until we can properly separate and even then we can’t afford to maintain another house and we live in area with pretty much no rentals anyway. Seperating and staying under the same roof is probably our only option for now. I am ok with that, having it acknowledged that our romantic relationship is over and showing the kids that there’s limits to what you have to put up with is important to me. I need to get a job somehow and eventually a lodger so I can buy him out and the kids don’t have to move or change schools.
My husband pretty much refuses to get counseling, he thinks it’s too expensive and he’d rather excercise ‘but that would take time away from me’ so he doesn’t. I told him to please run or swim at the public pool every morning, I don’t mind at all, but he hasn’t done it once.
This is getting long sorry. Basically, my mother is now saying marriages are hard work, bring a single mother is hard, I will have to sell the house, etc etc and my husband is now ‘trying his best’ by picking up maybe 10% of the household work and not yelling at me every night.
I guess I just need some support, and any advice on how to get through this upcoming trip staying in the same house as my parents, with jet lagged kids and STBXH… because I have no idea how to do this without loosing my mind and I feel like I am in a living nightmare.