Submitted by Sailorarctic t3_yo6rnf in relationship_advice
Update: Wow this blew up. For those wishing support. Thank you. For those saying they hope my husband leaves me, y'all are jerks. Please understand I wrote this in a moment of extreme vulnerability. I was sitting in a dark room listening to my sick 2 year old cry, unable to pick him up and soothe him without endangering my own life. While trying to grapple with the fact that I had just heard my husband yelling at the last baby we would ever have to shut up and that is NOT the man I know or married. My husband and I spoke this morning when he got up for work this morning and he was utterly ashamed of himself and his actions. He is going through a medication change himself and while it is working on the depression side of things it is NOT working for his anxiety and his anxiety is coming out as anger when he gets overwhelmed which is what happened last night. He actually considered stopping his new medication but I told him no because it has only been 2 weeks. It takes time for a new antidepressant to build up in your system and he has only ever been on one and it was over 10 years. It's been a long process of weening him off that one and onto the new one. My husband really, truly is a GREAT MAN and a FANTASTIC father. Last night was just a snapshot in time. He gets up every day at 3am and goes to work at 5 so he can be home at 2pm so he can spend every evening with his family and he changed to a lower paying job with this set schedule because before he had the higher pay but he would go sometimes 2 or 3 days only seeing me and the kids for five minutes and he hated it. When our older child gets home from school he does homework with her every night but as many of you guys have pointed out he gets overwhelmed very easily and I did ask him if he would be willing to go back to therapy to learn how to handle it better. Unfortunately my pain pills knocked me out before he answered me but I will ask again once he gets home. I'm sure he would be willing because he has never rejected therapy in the past and it has always helped he just stopped going during COVID and honestly getting him to make appointments to anything is like pulling teeth whether it be doctors, therapy, dentist. He needed his driver's licence renewed and he wouldn't make the phone call to do it. I had to show him he could make the appointment online before he would do it because he just can't handle talking on the phone to people. It's why we changed his medication because his anxiety is out of control.
I'm 48 hours removed from a hysterectomy and am sitting in a rocking chair in our sick 2 year old's room in tears this is not the first time I have been in a situation like this. When our daughter was 2 I needed an emergency appendectomy and was 48 hours removed from that surgery and was in much the same situation. My husband is a wonderful man and father. He's very loving and caring and devoted, dotes on me, to the point of being overbearing when it comes to my recovery after childbirth and surgery. But when it comes to what ai ACTUALLY need, which is for him to take care of our small children it feels like he is absolutely worthless. He can change their diapers, feed them, bathe them, yes, but without fail, at bedtime he loses his patience and the end result is always this. They are lying in bed crying. I'm sitting in the rocking chair unable to do anything but cry my own tears because I can't hold them to comfort them. There's dirty bedsheets on the floor because he has tried to give them medicine to soothe their symptoms but he doesnt know how to do it slowly and gently so it gets everywhere which makes him angry. Inevitably he ends up yelling at them to shut up and go to sleep which makes me say to stop yelling at them and if he can't handle it then I will go recover at my parents house with the kids. He then gets upset because he says no he wants me at home but he has to sleep for work. And on and on the cycle goes until I recover from surgery enough to be able to pick my children up again and handle the bedtime routine once more. Like I said. This is actually my third abdominal surgery so this is actually almost normal at this point and my family is becoming SICK of his behavior when it happens. They say he is their father he should be able to handle giving them medicine and putting them to bed without reducing me and them to tears especially since this is the third time now. I say it's my own fault cause I always handled bedtime so when surgery happens he just kinda gets thrown into the deep end.