My (36f) husband (31m) has been struggling with my anger and impatience with our children (9f and 7m) for the last couple of years. We have no village and I am burnt out. My husband insists that they play competitive hockey every year, and we are just running from October to March. We have put him through five years of apprenticeship school, and I have been working half days at a dead end job to be available for our kids and to not have to pay for childcare.
He resents me for being quick to anger, and for not working full time. We would actually make less if I worked full time and paid for childcare. And I still run the house, all the mental load. He comes home from work and his labour at home is minimal. He has hobbies still, including a weekly gaming night and a motorcycle, but I get nothing except guilted when I leave without making sure the kids have food made. Yet he keeps saying that he's burnt out and he feels like none of us care about him, he's just a paycheck.
I knew he was frustrated with this stage of life, but I didn't realize how bad it was. I went through his phone, and found a chatgpt message saying that I'm not who he thought I was and he's fallen out of love with me and he's in love with someone else. I confronted him, and he said it was my brother's girlfriend and it's just been a crush in his head for about a year, year and a half because she's so nice to him and asks him how he's doing. He said he wrote the message in frustration after I lost it on our daughter.
He got pretty upset when this all came to the surface, as he never wanted me to see that message and said he was never going to act on it, and wanted to make an effort to repair our relationship. We've been going to couples therapy, and I have been diagnosed with ADHD and suspect pmdd, I'm on Vyvanse now and it is greatly helping me manage my emotions. He is on antidepressants now, just started to manage his anxiety.
Last night I went through his phone again, and went down a rabbit hole of watching all of his liked and saved tiktoks. What I discovered was that he has hated me for the last four years. All of the videos he saved were about how a woman destroyed him, how he isn't willing to give anything except the bare minimum, how sometimes he's dying inside and wishes he wouldn't come home alive, how men stay for the kids and to not get financially screwed over. He's upset that I'm "digging" for a reason to be upset with him, and he hasn't liked anything like that in 6 months.
In this time over the last five years, we moved provinces, got married, bought a house, and more than doubled our income. We've busted our asses, all on our own with no village and even though it was hard, I thought there was pride and teamwork in how far we've come. I feel like I'm in an alternate reality, like everything I've believed and worked towards the last half decade wasn't real. I've been fighting for a relationship that wasn't honest. I've sacrificed myself for him and our children, and it wasn't appreciated. I'm at a loss of what to do, how to move forward.