Please post private.
Me and my husband have been together 9 years, I have a 16 year old daughter from a previous relationship who is autistic but does manage well but can be challenging at home and we have a 6 year old together.
Things have been difficult for the last 2 years on and off.
My husband works away 2 weeks at a time and home 3 weeks and I work mon-Fri full time.
My husband is a big drinker and when he’s at home drinks anywhere between 5-8 pints every night. He plays bowls and spends a lot of time at the pub and out with friends.
I’m constantly at home with the kids and do almost everything alone, I work, do all the housework as he doesn’t lift a finger in the house, I do all the running around for the kids after school clubs which they have every night, twice a week I dance with them so I do have a few hours of a hobby myself.
My husband if not out at the pub gets a beer around 7pm and sits on the sofa until he comes to bed around 12pm by which I’ve gone to bed already on my own, because I’m up at 6 to start work.
I never feel like we are a priority to him, we agreed he was just to play bowls Monday then come home, play football Thursday, play bowls and go out on a Friday night and then watch the local football team on a sat and Tuesday when they are at home. But then this turns into staying at pub on a Monday night, watching bowls games on a Wednesday, Saturday or Sunday either staying out after football has finished or playing a bowls competition which takes all day. I’ve asked time and time again if he can keep weekends free so that we can spend time as a family or together when his mum has the children.
We are rarely intimate because he’s constantly downstairs until late and I just cannot cope on the little sleep I was getting staying up until he came to bed.
He doesn’t get up of a morning and stays in bed almost all day.
I’ve explained that drink is ruining our relationship, he’s tired because he’s drinking daily, he’s anxious so says he needs to drink but then misses his antidepressants, he doesn’t help in the house because he spends all day in bed, he racked up a LOT of debt last year gambling, I took loans out to get into a better position and then he ran the debt back up in which I’ve this year had to sort out a secured loan against out house to pay the debt off again, so I’m very money conscious. Then he says I’m controlling and pushes back by saying he will go out and I need to accept his lifestyle or we won’t work.
Things have got worse with the drinking recently, we don’t spend loads of time together because I enjoy having my kids and don’t just want to palm them off to his parents who do offer to look after them. He’s told his mum I’m just no fun anymore and when I told her about our issues and his behaviour she said well there’s clearly a reason he wants to be out the house all the time and maybe I need to look at that, they condone his behaviour because his dad plays bowls and they are also big drinkers. But I constantly feel exhausted trying to juggle everything myself. When we go away for a weekend we have a great time, I’m not a massive drinker myself as I have Crohn’s and it can make me flare up. But he links fun to drink and can’t seem to accept people don’t need to drink to enjoy themselves and I do think he’s has a dependency to some level on drink, he’s now been on the sick for 6 months and has drank every single day where as when he’s at work he can’t drink so does get a break when he’s at work.
6 days ago he promised he wouldn’t drink everyday but then hasn’t stopped so I poured 2 cans down the sink and then he just got up and went to the pub at 8:30pm on his own. At that point I was really down, my mum has cancer and we are going through a court case as witnesses to a fatal accident last year which has left a lot of PTSD for both me and my husband. The drinking isn’t a new thing related to the trauma he has always been a big drinker. I asked him to leave and go to his mums after walking out to the pub but now he’s saying that he doesn’t want to work things out at all, we need to just put the kids first and that he says I don’t like him as a person.
I love him more than anything, I do get annoyed with him a lot because I’m left to do everything while he treats the house like a hotel and does what he wants, but sometimes I feel it’s just the stage of life we are at, we are parents life isn’t fun 24/7, we are tired and work hard and this is just a small period of our life that the kids are priority and there will become a time again when we are ourselves and can spend lots of time together again.
The thought of not being with him absolutely breaks me and I’ve been having panic attacks again that I was managing to keep at bay until now. 2 years ago he came home from work and just said he was leaving me and went to his mums, I begged him back and we sorted things out. But we seem to be back here again now and I don’t think this time he wants to sort things at all. I’ve been a single parent before and I don’t want this again for the kids. I don’t think we are bad all the time, just daily life is hard and tiring that gets in the way of fun.
I really don’t know how to rectify things or bring that spark back? Has anyone been here before and worked things out?
Source