Apologies for how long this post is. I just need to get it out. My husband and I are both in our mid 20s, married for 6 years and I think our marriage has hit the breaking point.
I would never describe our marriage as the best in the world. We were high school sweethearts who got married a year after graduating. We dealt with infertility but were blessed with two children. Things were okay, we definitely had tensions due to postpartum depression and learning the life of parenthood, but over time he’s really changed. He’s gotten angrier and easier to trigger. I thought he had bipolar disorder with how badly he would switch from good to bad, like Jekyll and Hyde. I’d beg him to go to therapy and get help for his anger but he never took it seriously. I thought he developed a porn addiction after finding onlyfans subscriptions and multiple porn accounts saved on his Reddit. He would call me dramatic, that I was always overreacting. He just isn’t anyone close to who he was just 5 years ago.
Now here’s the doozy- we and our two toddlers live with my grandma. Shes elderly and had a stroke last year that affected her vision and cognitive abilities. Due to that, her doctor recommended that she have someone live with her in case she needs help with anything. We were already living here due to us never having enough money to buy or not good enough credit to rent/get a loan. So now, I at least feel stuck here.
A few weeks ago, my toddlers were rough-housing like usual and one took a tumble off the couch quicker than I was able to catch him. I, of course, scream out of fear my 1.5 year old just got hurt. That set off my husband who was across the house. Despite seeing nothing that happened, he stomped into the living room and started yelling at me for being a bad mother and “allowing” my kids to get hurt. Then he took our 3 year old, assuming they pushed the younger one off the couch, and spanked them. Protective mama bear mode kicked in and I started screaming at my husband to stop. My grandma then walks in and starts yelling at the both of us to stop fighting and for my husband to stop spanking our child. My husband then started yelling at her, saying she had to place to tell him what to do. He ended up packing a bag, yelled “f you” to us once more, and left for his mother’s house. Hes been there two weeks.
He wants nothing to do with my grandma now and won’t even come into the house when he comes to see the kids. He tries to text me apologies for lashing out the way he did, but when I practically beg him to talk to my grandma and try to work things out he refuses and says he has nothing to apologize for. I get he may not feel like standing up for the way he parenting shouldn’t be apologized for, but I feel he needs to apologize to everyone in the house for his rage, including my grandma. He’s now saying I need to choose him or my grandma because he refuses to live in the same house as her. My grandma can’t live alone, she has no other family, and can’t afford a home nurse. I feel horrible for not wanting to choose my husband, but that would include uprooting mine and my two young kids’ entire lives and finding someone to take care of my grandma, unless I planned to go back and forth between houses every day. And frankly, I don’t feel safe living alone with someone so angry. If he has no hesitation to scream at me the things he did in front of my own grandma, I couldn’t imagine the things that would happen alone in a house with him. I’m just lost.
If you read this whole thing, thank you. Just getting my words out helps, knowing someone’s actually reading them means so much more. I’ll take advice if you got it.