Dear world:
tl;dr: My husband and I have a six-month-old baby girl. I need to decide if a divorce is right or wrong for her well-being. What is better? This relationship or growing up with divorced parents, a potentially messy co-parenting situation or a single mama? I need help, I am completely lost, frightened and alone.
Let me start by telling you the good: My husband and I share values, interests and passions. We enjoy spending time together. I’m attracted to him. I admire his strength and drive. He makes me feel safe in the world. We share a history of 10 years. A lot of memories, a lot of good times. We built an amazing life together. Fulfilling careers, financial stability, a house we want to remodel, a community. We have lots of dreams for the future as a family and dreams beyond that time. He supports me. He wants me to succeed and he’ll do almost anything to make me happy. If I want to go somewhere or do something or need help with a something, he’ll make that thing his own and help, happily investing any amount of resources in whatever I need. He is incredibly generous to me and everyone else. We have loved becoming parents. He was incredibly supportive during my pregnancy and the delivery of our baby. He fell head over heals in love with his little baby girl. I can see his heart and soul light up when he sees her and holds her and tends to her. He has also been an incredible partner to me as a new mama. He has mostly taken my guidance how to parent our daughter, and has supported me in the ideas I have suggested. He has picked up work around the house to make sure I can use the baby’s nap times to work, and he has put finances in place to make sure her and I are safe no matter what happens to him.
And here is the bad and ugly:
I will remember the first incident clearly until the day I die. We had just started dating, we were in a state of complete bliss. We went out for a walk one night to just look at the stars and he said: Mexico is the biggest country by surface. And I said, all little girl, head-over-heals in love, admiring all of his knowledge and experience and strength and everything else about him: No. Mexico? Really? I said it in a tone of admiration, like, really? Tell me more. You are so smart, you know so much. And he flipped the lid. He screamed at me: What the fuck is wrong with you, you’re just like all the others, why does nobody believe me, why does everybody doubt what I say. I recognized pain that had nothing to do with me. So I stood still in complete shock for a second and then reached out to gently take his hand. He harshly slapped it away and stormed off. (He had been to a meeting earlier where he had expected to be offered a job, but hadn’t.) He came to my apartment the next day, smiled at me and hugged me, and never mentioned the incident again.
And here are recent incidents since our daughter was born:
He has a pond in the yard with fish in it. One morning he went outside, I was in the kitchen with the baby. I heard him scream: Noooooo! and he came storming into the kitchen and said, aggressively: Did you turn off the pond protection device?!?! All the fish are gone. I said very calmly, no I didn’t, retreating, afraid of what would come next. That can’t be he kept going, aggressively ranting, all the fish gone, all of them. Go outside and look. That can’t be, you must have turned it off. And then I remembered that I actually HAD turned it off and not back on the day before and I said: Oh wait. Shit! I DID turn it off. Oh no. And then he really turned it up. What is so hard about remembering to turn it back on, look at what you did, all the fish gone, what do you want to do now, how do you want to fix this. I quietly picked up the baby and left the room, saying please, not around the baby. He followed me around the house to keep, not screaming, but heatedly and aggressively blaming me and demanding answers and apologies while I kept saying, please, not around the baby. When I talked to him about this, he said that I misunderstood. Proof for this being a misunderstanding is that he didn’t care about the fish at all, and that I should have just answered his questions and that my walking away was aggressive and triggered him further.
The next one was a huge blowup just a few weeks later. I triggered him. I made the first mistake here. I know that. I asked him to get me a swaddle from the dryer while I put the baby to sleep and he left and didn’t come back and it was a stressful situation and I was mad, so I just stomped past him in the kitchen and got it myself. He did not deserve that. He didn’t. Hands! Down! He completely lost his shit. He screamed and yelled insults at me completely out of control as a result. I ran in the bedroom, quietly and quickly closed the doors and turned on the white noise machines and I pray to God that it was fast enough, that I'm mistaken and our baby didn’t yet understand. I came out of the bedroom when the baby was asleep and confronted him. Scared as shit, I said: Have you lost your mind? You have got to be kidding me. The baby heard that! I came into the room and she was wide-eyed, stiff as a board. And he lost it. He screamed like an animal. I asked for a conversation after that and he agreed. I very calmly told him that this can never ever happen again. That I cannot raise a baby in a broken home. That whatever we will do right will be worthless if we do this. I asked him to take anger management classes and go to therapy. What followed were the most horrible three weeks of my life. He could not admit wrongdoing. He said that my behavior had triggered him, that my passive aggression is worse than his active aggression, that I am influencing our child to see him as a predator. I tried to have conversations again and again, but he just told me I was the problem and ignored me aggressively. I had anxiety attacks during that time, waking up in the middle of the night with my heart racing. It got so bad that I just started shaking uncontrollably, cold sweat running down my body when he was around. I told him this and he said I should just stop shaking. I researched options to leave, looked at apartments and ways to divorce and co-parent. Then, one day, he kind of came around. He told me that I had been heard. That this will never happen again. The he gets that I will leave if it does. That he admired me for fighting so hard for our daughter. He could not agree to counseling or anger management because that meant putting a “broken” stamp on our relationship and he could not deal with that. It was quiet for a couple of months after that.
Then, last week, we were driving. He used the phone and the car’s navigation system to get directions, something is not working, he gets frustrated, impatiently dictates directions, gets lost and aggressively mutters What The Fuck. When we arrive and get out of the car, calm energy now, I calmly tell him that I think our baby picks up on this energy and that if it’s scary to me, I can only imagine how scary it is to her. He barks at me that that I should diffuse the situation and that me telling him this is aggressive and what he did wasn’t. I try again. I say that I’m not being aggressive, that I’m only asking and he says Fuck you, I’m not doing this and storms off. The next morning, I’m in the bathroom getting ready, grateful that he stayed a little later that morning so I have time to take a shower. Baby is with me on the bathroom floor, we’re playing with makeup brushes. Baby peed on the sheet and he wants to put a new sheet on the mattress. He asks where the sheets are and what I have been doing to protect the mattress and what he’s supposed to do now that the mattress is wet, put on a protector or no protector because the mattress needs a protector but if he puts it on now that it’s wet, the mattress will start molding. His questions and statements are aggressive and impatient. I tell him that his energy is scaring me. His reply: Just shut up and there won’t be anything scary here.
I tried to talk to him twice after that. He got aggressive and defensive, started lying and twisting reality, tried to push all my buttons so he could turn this around and present ME as the aggressor, then threatened divorce if I continued to see him as a predator. I told him that I can’t do this anymore, that we need to go see a therapist. I begged. I asked him to please do this for our baby if he can’t do it for us. That I love him so much, that this is fixable, that it will be amazing to grow together and figure this out. He coldly asked me what happened if he didn’t agree, and I just quietly said that I can’t do this, that I would need to leave. And he said that I’ll have to leave then and he was done with the conversation. He aggressively ignored me and the baby for two days, then came back in the room, smiled, and expected for things to go back to normal.
For what happened in the 10 years between the first incident and these latest ones, I have no neat package. I have no understanding of what is actually going on. I only have fragmented thoughts, events and feelings.
When a conversation gets heated, I end up not knowing what’s up and what’s down. I don’t know how this happens. It has something to do with him twisting reality and getting into the Red Zone when I push a point that’s just true beyond doubt. When he realizes that there is no logical way other than admitting to a mistake, a line is crossed, and all bets are off.
When I make a mistake and apologize, to him, he doesn’t accept my apology. His response is basically that I should be feeling bad.
In the beginning, when I still fought back, I packed my bags a lot of times. He would always try to force me to stay when I was about to walk out the door. Once things got so heated, neighbors called the police. Our landlord’s son (we lived in the same apartment for 6 years before we moved to the house we now live in) once knocked on the door and said: I don’t know if things ever get physical, but you don’t need to be treated this way and we are here to help. Our other neighbor once said bluntly with both of us present: Listen, we know he beats you up. When we got back home after that, he said that this is what we get from my drama. That people think he beats me.
He got actually physical three times, but I have to say that I was never afraid that he would actually physically harm me. Two times he pinned me down on the bed. I don’t remember the ‘reason.’ Once, we had been working 48 hours straight on a project with a tight deadline. I said that I had to sleep for a few hours; that I had it under control, that I would meet the deadline even with a few hours of rest. He demanded I do one more thing because he didn’t agree with MY assessment for MY portion of the work that he knew a lot less about and than me and could not really assess. I said I could not go one minute longer, let alone complete what he wanted me to complete before going home, and he pulled me out of the chair by my neck and pinned me against the wall. We never talked about this after. My behavior had not brought this on. My tone in response to his demand that I keep working might have been defensive or cranky or even non-negotiable, but definitely in the reasonable realm.
One more thing that’s noticeable about him is a complete lack of empathy. I have never known anyone to respond to the pain they cause with such indifference.
His being late is almost comical. And by late I mean hours late because he just doesn’t care. (He says that himself: I don’t care. If I care, I’m on time.)
He talks about himself and his accomplishments, plans and thoughts with great passion and for hours and hours. As long as someone will listen. (I listened for 10 years. We really talked about him almost exclusively for all this time.) But the moment the person talks about themselves, his eyes glaze over, his energy shifts to disinterest, and he’ll very quickly start looking around the room or start playing with his phone. This is not true in conversations with people he respects or considers worthy of being liked by.
When I tell him something, anything, his first and only response is to dismiss and/or question it. This can be something simple, like: I think the trail will be muddy and his response, immediate and without thinking and weird because I know the trail and he doesn’t: Bullshit. Or joy: I open the oven and the cake I made turned out exactly like I wanted and I laugh and dance with joy and he walks in stonefaced and I try: Look, look, look, oh isn’t it amazing? And he says nothing and I try again: What do you think? And he says, well I don’t know I haven’t tried it yet.
He screams at service people on the phone or in person if they don’t give him what he wants. Even if they are right and he is completely in the wrong, like showing up at the gate for a flight when the gate has already closed.
It has always been clear to me that he understood on some level after an incident that what he did was wrong. He would, following an incident, always say what a terrible person he is. But never related to the incident. Just in a general, almost victim-like way. He would sometimes offer a blank apology, but when asked what he’s apologizing for, he would just say because you feel bad. When asked if that means he could have done something better, the answer is always no.
He has problems with a lot of people he interacts with on a regular basis. He makes people cry at work, people keep telling him that he is abrasive and arrogant and hard to work with. He doesn’t really have any friends other than former love interests.
It sometimes feel that to him, he and I are the same person. It feels like he sees my accomplishments, in some way, as his own.
Let me end by saying that I’m a work in progress, too. I make a lot of mistakes. I tend to need space for myself. I can get annoyed which I know is so hurtful. When I’m stressed out, I get all flustered and overwhelmed. That’s bad and I know it, but I do own my stuff. When I make a mistake, I admit it. I apologize, I need to make things right to feel at peace with myself. And I work on it. I make sure I stay in a good space mentally, emotionally and spiritually, I seek advice, I try to grow.
What do I do? A divorce? Is that better for my little girl? Growing up a child of divorced parents? Potentially a messy co-parenting situation in which I cannot protect her when she is with him? Or her growing up without a dad in her life? What is the right thing to do here?
Thank you so much for reading.
Submitted March 29, 2019 at 09:18AM by JohannasSister https://ift.tt/2Fwqcgk
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