Okay. First of all, I'm glad I found this place. Any place where someone can post "I hate being a mom" and find support instead of being stoned to death or drowned has to be a good thing.
I too was thinking I was alone.
Here's the story, and forgive me if I rant, but I really, really need to get all this out in the open and maybe finally make sense of it all.
I am in the middle of my ninth month of pregnancy.
When I first found out I was pregnant, I was not thrilled (where's my Understatement of the Year award?).
Without going into grisly detail, suffice it to say my husband pulled a nasty trick on me.
We were both active duty military at the time, facing a deployment, and it was the worst possible timing. I had already told him I wasn't ready to have children. I wasn't even sure I ever wanted children (but I was pretty sure I didn't).
I guess he decided to decide for both of us.
I immediately fell into a deep depression. I couldn't function at work. I was always either crying or wanting to cry. I stayed angry.
At first I was afraid the Army would take action against me and I'd get an Article 15 (half my pay taken, demotion, etc). Maybe that sounds crazy, but it happens. They think you're trying to get out of deployment, which was exactly the opposite in my case.
Turns out, as I was already permanently injured, they assumed I wasn't going anyway (but if this hadn't happened, I was, no matter how bad the injury). They were more supportive than I expected.
However, now I faced another decision: Get out of the Army, or stay in. In a way, it was another decision already made for me. With both of us on Active Duty, I would have been joining him in Iraq when the baby reached four months. She would have had to live with my parents a year. They would have been okay with this, but they're extremely financially strained, and I couldn't do that to them.
I tried to think of ways to stay in anyway, like sending them the money they needed to care for her. I told my husband this, and he said that whatever I decided, he was behind me 100%.
I should have known better.
When I told him I planned to stay, his response was that he would do something stupid to get discharged, since I wasn't willing to be a "good stay at home mom".
Well, let me tell you about this awesome dad.
He is selfish and immature. Before we got married, he seemed to be the only "adult" male I knew. Turns out, he was faking. Lying. In reality, he wastes money without a thought to the future. He is emotionally abusive. I've been called names I hadn't heard outside of movies until now. He kicked in our bathroom door because he didn't know why a grown woman might want some privacy in her own home once she was married.
He drives recklessly when angry with his pregnant wife in the car: 70 mph in a residential area. I had to scream at him over the noise of his Godsmack CD to slow down or let me out before he stopped. Is that a form of physical abuse?
He drank like a fish, claimed he wasn't drunk, and then tried to paw all over me until I had to physically push him away, close the bedroom door and go to sleep.
After I'd had enough of this, I went to a counselor, and she had him removed from the house until she could speak to him. That made him think a little, I guess, because he stopped drinking and started going to anger management.
Of course there were still issues.
Instead of admitting that he was wrong, he said he was trying to be better because he didn't want me kicking him out of "his" apartment again (nevermind that the rent tended to come out of "my" checking account, and we wouldn't have it if I didn't scrape to make sure).
However, things did improve a bit, and as I was still insane from the depression I guess I allowed more BS than I normally would have. In addition to this, he is from a severely broken home, and had no examples to follow on being a husband or a father. Stupid me, I pitied him, and I didn't want my first marriage to end in divorce after only a few months.
Still, as much as I wanted to stay active, I couldn't take a chance on him getting out on a misconduct discharge and being my baby's only caregiver. Not the way he was acting. So I made the decision to get out for her sake.
It felt like ending my own life.
I wanted an abortion. My mother talked me out of it. I still don't know if I was right to let her. She said I was just depressed, that I wasn't thinking clearly, and I knew she was right... but nine months later, here I am, still just as depressed and still wondering sometimes why I didn't do it. I can't explain how I can love this baby and still wish I'd had an abortion, but somehow I can.
So we continued going to counseling. It was all right at first. Our communication improved, but something still wasn't right.
We were struggling financially, and it was needless. We would have had the money if he hadn't been spending it on fast food and video games and animals we couldn't afford that he wouldn't let me find homes for -- he wouldn't take care of them, either. He let them go hungry if they annoyed him. Is this abuse? Is it indicative of the kind of parent he would be? I think so.
Now, I kept telling him I felt like I was all alone in trying to keep the money together. He told me his bank account info was going to his sister because she managed things for him while he was in basic training. He assured me I'd get the info when she got his next statement.
Well, months go by, and he is wasting all of his income and mine is paying bills and being overdrawn due to emergencies (and vet bills) he won't save to cover.
We continue counseling, and the therapist continues to tell me that everything I'm saying and feeling is perfectly sane and justifiable...
But then I hear that she has told him my plans to homeschool our daughter amount to abuse. That my being homeschooled is why I'm so "weird" and "dysfunctional".
In reality, being homeschooled was the best thing for me and my sisters. We have never tried drugs, we have never dealt with bullies, we grew up to be our own people with our own individual talents. Maybe public school is fine, I don't know, I didn't attend -- but I do know my husband got heavily into substance abuse there, and his glowing memories of high school all involve picking on smaller kids, beating people up and being highly popular because of it. He has numerous stab wounds.
Furthermore, if she thinks that being homeschooled made me "weird" and "socially inept", maybe she should look at the fact that I am a Military Police officer with good communication skills and straight A's on my college transcripts.
He also told me she said our relationship was "twisted and co-dependent". That I enjoyed the abuse, even provoked it.
She told him I was stupid to think the way he treats animals is indicative of the kind of parent he'll be.
Well, isn't that how serial killers get started?
Honestly, I don't know if this is true. I'm really not certain he's bright enough to make it up... but maybe playing stupid is something evil people do.
I should have confronted her about it. Between the exhaustion and the depression and fighting the Army to process my paperwork (I went through six months of hell when a discharge for pregnancy is supposed to take two weeks, but that's another horror story), I didn't have it in me. I stopped seeing her. I suppose it could have been true, because all the counselors and doctors I'd seen in the military were quite twisted. One told me his professional opinion was that I was depressed because I was secretly a lesbian, and I needed an abortion right away.
Anyway, here we were at the end of my discharge. I was due out of the Army in four days, and he confides that he expected me to ignore him when he said he'd get a misconduct discharge. That it was perfectly okay for me to stay in.
I know it was because he realized I was right, and that we would not survive on his income alone.
Selfishness strikes again: Put me through six months of misery and then take it all back and expect it to be okay because he can't live without his expensive video games.
I'd had it.
I said I wanted a divorce.
We were working through the particulars one night, and suddenly he had yet another change of heart. I'll do anything, he said.
Well, okay, how about you let me fix our financial situation?
Okay, okay, whatever.
Then he admits it:
He never planned on giving me access to his account, because he assumed I was cheating on him with a guy from my company and he didn't want me to "clean him out".
For one thing, what kind of pregnant woman has an affair? And for another, how could he have possibly thought I was the type? Did he never listen to anything I said (turns out the answer to that one is "no", and I'm pretty sure it still is).
Anyway. That's our little story.
I now have access to the joint account, and I maintain my own separate account that he does not have access to, because I still do not trust him. He is still breaking us at every opportunity.
I'm living with my parents near my Army Reserve unit, because one weekend a month does not deprive my baby of her mother and I know I was meant to serve my country.
I'm working towards getting back on my feet financially and literally... my injuries have worsened with the weight of the baby, as my doctor told me they would. I am in constant, chronic pain. If my OB doesn't agree I need a C-section, my career is over... and he doesn't, because the Army doctored my records to make it look like nothing is wrong with me to avoid paying me disability. Sounds paranoid, I guess, but it's true. They told me many times that I'd be unable to have a natural birth because it would ruin me for the rest of my life. They wrote in my records that basically, I was malingering and making stuff up.
He is on active duty still, states away, but he is being medically discharged against his will for injuries (how's that for karma).
We're still married, but things are not that great. He spends fifteen dollars on one meal. He bought a computer to "work on promotion points", but instead he bought World of Warcraft (which comes with a monthly fee). He somehow runs up astronomical electric bills all by himself. He claimed he'd find a roommate to help with the rent, but of course he rethought that when he realized he could not live like a bachelor.
I'm sure the apartment is full of pornography again, now that I'm not there to throw it away when I run into it during housecleaning.
We're still married.
The thing is, I still love him. Am I an idiot?
When he drove me down here, he stayed for ten days on leave, and he was the guy I fell in love with and more. He was suddenly supportive. He was loving, and offered comfort, and I don't know... was he that way because my parents were looking at him, or was he that way because they were nice to him, and he needs a family, and he realized that I was honest all along because he saw where I came from?
Now that he's back on post, a thousand miles away, as I said, he's doing a lot of stupid things with the money again... but he's still not drinking (that I know of), and he doesn't call me names, and he's not violent.
We discussed the pornography issue, and he doesn't understand why it bothers me. When he went on leave to see his own family (I couldn't get leave approved to go with him), he said he'd gotten a lap dance, and told me he'd visited his eight-months-pregnant drug-addicted stripper friend. When I was upset, he didn't seem to get why. His answer was "I didn't PAY for the lap dance, so why isn't it okay?"
He said he'd stop these things because they upset me, but he still claims he thinks it's perfectly normal behavior. Am I nuts?
Is this depression because of the pregnancy, is it because of the way my life is going, or am I maybe bipolar, like my father?
I don't know if I'm the one who's crazy, or if everything else is.
When he calls, I'm too tired to confront him on things. We argued for so long, and it seems to do so little good, and I don't know if there's hope or if I'm wasting my breath.
I sit silently and listen to him talk about video games. If I speak, he interrupts, because apparently I'm not all that interesting.
Also, I don't want to make things harder on him, because I know the hell he's going through with the Army and his injuries all too well. I've been there.
Please help.
I don't know what to think anymore.
