I'm not going to go into all the details about my marriage/relationship but this still will be long. I will tell you that we have been together for 6 years, married for 3.5 of those yrs, with 3 young kids under the age of 4. In the beginning everything was wonderful, of course, we had no worries, lots of money and no real major responsibilities. During my 1st pregnancy we had a lot of struggle due to my husband's refusal to act more responsibly with money and our relationship. In a sense he needed to change to accommodate the new arrival and the family lifestyle. Over the years and a lot of struggles, yelling matches, etc he has gotten a lot better but will never fully be someone that I can be compatible with due to stubborness, communication and personality conflict, as I am coming to see very clearly lately. Actually for the past year, I have almost walked out the door seriously once and have thought about it in silence ever since. I have recently gone back to full-time shift work at a very stressful job and find that I am the only one that does the majority of the household work on top of everything. I have no time to myself, of course the kids take most of it but he is rarely around and with our shifts, we see each other maybe for a couple days every two weeks. We've had financial problems for the past 4 yrs of our relationship making it difficult to live with him; he's very materialistic and wants to buy irresponsible things all the time. I am miserable, exhausted, not only from my job and kids but from the relationship and always trying to make things work. I feel like I could do everything I am doing now on my own without any loss. I also feel due to all of this that I have lost myself, my own personality. I am not the person I used to be and I hate it. I find that I wake up exhausted and miserable on my days off from work and irritable towards everyone, even my kids. I hate that I am this way and feel guilty about taking it out on my kids, even though I don't mean to. I feel like we bring out the worst in each other and that in order to get my own personality back that I need to leave the situation but in a sense I don't know if that would solve everything. My job is a big factor in how miserable I am but we financially need me to work where I work, I would not make enough anywhere else. In a sense I feel like he's forcing me into working there. He always says that it won't be forever but it's been since we met. I feel as though I am emotionally dead; I don't cry about this anymore and honestly don't believe that I am in love with my husband anymore. Everything he does makes me angry and I have a lot of resentful feelings towards him, for good reasons. I think that I know it's over but I'm really finding it hard to take the steps to leave and scared about the result afterwards with not only the financial aspects but being overwhelmed with everything and having no real live-in help. Not that he helps a lot anyway but he does a little.
I'm sorry for this being so long; I guess I really just needed to get this off my chest but for those of you who have been here, when did you know and when did you actually take the step to leave?
Thanks for listening and any advice you have.
Melanie
