Breakdown in Inside My Head

I’m almost 22 weeks pregnant and I feel so sorry for my unborn child. It’s coming into the world to parents who barely get along. Michael and I had a huge fight (again) and I just don’t see this lasting. I am so miserable. I work at a job that I hate solely for the paycheck and the insurance benefits. Michael has been laid off twice since 2008 and while he like his current job, it doesn’t pay at lot and hi work hours are horrendous. He got home around 11pm yesterday. This company is on the brink of going public (supposedly) so anyone with invested stock options could see a big return (supposedly).

We fight almost all the time. I don’t even know when this started. Maybe when we brought Sam home? Michael was cruel and generally unhelpful from the beginning. He was rude to my mother who stayed with us in an attempt to help me transition with the baby. Things got so bad my mother left, leaving me alone with a baby. I had pretty bad postpartum depression, which did not help. The first time I cut the baby’s nails, I cut the baby’s thumb accidentally and Mike yelled at me. He wuld yell or make fun of me if I made a mistake or lost my temper. He rarely go up to the baby at night (still doesn’t).

Now that I’m pregnant a second time thing haven’t gotten better. Usually we’re ok during the week when we primarily rely on text messaging to communicate. The weekends are horrendous. I wake up early with Sam and make a mad dash to try and catch up on the cleaning, laundry, food shopping, and miscellaneous chores that I couldn’t do during the week. On top of working a full time job I also work a contract position as a medical writer. I try and stay up late on week nights, but after being up since 4:30 am, I usually just pass out. Michael tells me how tired he is, which irks me, because yes he works long hours, but I work two jobs and am primarily responsible for transporting Sam to and from daycare, doing laundry and dishes, cleaning, taking care of the dogs, etc. We end up fighting by Saturday afternoon, and often Sunday is spent not speaking to each other.

This morning Michael was especially angry, which I didn’t even acre about because he flipped out on me in public at the aquarium over the weekend. He apologized, but it had ruined my afternoon. Sunday his parents came over, and while they were actually well behaved it just wasn’t a fun relaxing day off for me. Michael made a snide comment about lack of his family’s pictures in our house which set off another argument. So this morning when he wasn’t speaking to me I really just didn’t care. He starts sending me multiple texts this morning because a check he was supposed to receive didn’t arrive, so he naturally blamed me. Then he also blamed me for throwing out a box of his stuff. I am absolutely guilty for throwing out a box of old CDs and pens, but I had been asking for over a month for him to please move it somewhere else and organize it. The man is a pack rat and it’s infuriating. He’s trashed our garage and basement with boxes he’s always meaning t go through but never does. When he redid our bathrooms he still had sealed boxes of stuff from when we moved into the house…five years ago. So I chucked them. I’m a huge believer in organization. So he starts calling me a piece of shit and a cunt. Nice, right? Nice to say to your wife 5 1/2 months pregnant with your second child. So I called him some terrible names and now we’re not speaking. Again.

In 2008 Mike lost his job. We had been dating for three years and planned on getting married. I very stupidly agreed that we still move in together while Mike searched for another job. After all, he had a MBA, how hard would it be? We were at the start of the Great Recession, and it took two years. Plus he went back to school and put himself more in debt so he could become an accountant. While I worked two, sometimes three, jobs over the years, I was lucky if Mike had one. He got fired again a year and a half ago; luckily finding a job took only two weeks. Still, I have always had to work harder to support him and have had the brunt of the financial responsibility placed on my shoulders. I paid for the down payment for the house and the majority of the mortgage payment. I paid off 20k of his credit card debt. After doing the bathrooms last spring we had about 4k of credit card debt, which we seem to have a hard time paying off. I still work two jobs and find it always amazing that everything is still tight. I have about 42k saved for retirement. Michael just started saving (he’s 35 years old) and has about 5k. Looks like I’ll be paying for retirement as well. Oh, and all of his student loans? There’s a balloon payment at the end, which God knows what that will do to our finances. Don’t even get me started on Sam’s college savings account. Spoiler alert: it’s zero. And after all this I get called a cunt and a piece of shit.

I will be miserable to lose Sam every other weekend, holidays, and half the summer, but I have no idea what else to do. This marriage is a gigantic failure and I have a second baby arriving in a few months. I want to run away and cry. Or disappear, whichever.