So tonight–in the middle of the night–my husband started snapping at me because I agreed to stay an hour and a half later tomorrow to help a coworker. This will enable me to leave work an hour and a half earlier later in the week. 

This shittiness toward me regarding my work hours has been a regular thing ever since I took a new job a year ago. My husband likes that I’m making $5 more than at my last job, he likes telling people I work for a university, but my work hours leave him alone with our 3 y/o son on the weekends, until about a quarter to 7. Nevermind that I was alone with our son every single weekend until he was two, while my husband worked a weekend job. And don’t forget how I had to listen to him complain about working two jobs while the rest of the world owed him for having it SO easy.

And somehow, this is WAY harder on him than it ever was on me. He will sit and make a case for it if I even suggest that he’s just doing what I was doing. What any dad in a 2 income house is doing, actually. 

There are times when just coming home is a nightmare. There are times when he calls me at work to bitch and rile me up when I have students to supervise and a building to run. But what’s important here is that I “abandoned” them by just going to work. What’s important is that he lets me know every time he gets tired and frustrated, that it’s somehow all my fault. I’ve done this to him. When he’s feeling particularly spiteful he turns it into what I’ve done to THEM. Yes, I’ve abandoned my son to *gasp* work so we can (just barely) survive. I’m just a terrible mom.

I come home and try to be cheerful and upbeat to combat the tension my husband has already spent the entire day building up against me, and I just get snide remarks or sulking or the cold shoulder or, my personal favorite, the silent walk out the (slamming) door as soon as I get inside. He’s never gone for more than 10 minutes. He just enjoys the drama of pretending to leave. Each time he does this, I wish he’d just stay gone. No luck yet.

I got up to tend to my son who woke up and started crying–he just lost his blanket. The second I climbed back into bed my husband starts grumbling and snapping about how I stay for coworkers who never stay for me and how I’ve got no backbone at work. 1) The coworker in question HAS covered for me. 2) I’m a manager. If I can’t stay for someone for a lousy hour and a half, I’m an easily replacable manager. DH is a teacher and doesn’t seem to grasp that I don’t have a pool of substitutes ready to fill in for me if I call off like he does. 

I just snapped. It’s been a long time coming. I told him I was tired of being treated like dirt when all I’ve done is walk through the damn door. I don’t deserve to be villainized for working an extra hour and 30 minutes because a coworker asked me. I told him that the way he treats me when he’s angry/frustrated/tired is wrong and it needed it to stop.

Of course this blew up into how it’s my fault. My husband doesn’t know how to stop fighting and fix a problem. He just blames or walks away while running his mouth. He accused me of escalating the situation by not letting it go when he said he was done talking about it. It’s fucking laughable that he thinks that’s even an option after you’ve just lashed out at someone. I mean, shit, why would there be a consequence for treating another person like garbage, especially after you’ve declared the subject closed afterward?He thinks I should be a ball-buster with my coworkers but a doormat for him. My bad. I’ll go shut up now. 

Look, I’m not faultless. I’m not a perfect wife, but I try like hell to get to the root of our problems so we can solve them. I’m tired of all the festering in my marriage. There’s only so many times I can bite my tongue because I don’t want to fight in front of my son. There’s only so many times I can allow my husbad to bark orders at me like I’m one of his students. Or hear him declare “Nevermind, you won’t do it!” five seconds after asking me to do some non-time-sensative task, like close the window or blow out the candles in the kitchen. I mean, do you know one of his problems with me is that I insist he say please and thank you if he wants me to do something??? He actually said this like it’s unreasonable to expect your spouse to use respectful language. 

He walked out in the middle of talking only to storm back into the living room and declare himself falsely accused of treating me like dirt, because he cooks breakfast (and sometimes dinner, because of my schedule) and pays our mortgage. I just got this feeling in my chest like I want to laugh and cry at the same time because he was 100% serious and I feel like any reasoning is 100% lost on him. I explained that whether or not his intention was to treat me like dirt, his behavior toward me made me feel like dirt, so paying the mortagage and making breakfast, as appreciative as I am, aren’t enough to sustain our marriage if we don’t start making a concerted effort to fix the way we talk to each other when things get tense. Otherwise, we’re not going to last. 

He just said “Yeah” and went back to bed. 

I hate when people say things like “Well, you knew who you were marrying. Why are you surprised now?”

I didn’t know who I was marrying. Sure there were some red flags that I overlooked. But he’s not the same man I married. Maybe divorce wouldn’t exist in the world if people didn’t stop pretending to be the person they thought you’d want to marry.