Hi Northern, I feel you here. I am a mom of 4 extremely active kids (who is responsible for pretty much all of their activities outside of getting them to and home from school), work fulltime as well as have 2 PRN positions, pay just about all of the house bills, do just about all of the shopping (food, clothes, shoes, etc), outside of 1 load of dishes that my uBPDh does every morning am responsible for cleaning the house, take care of our 3 cats and was told this weekend that he will no longer be responsible for mowing the grass or weeding or any outside of the house responsibilities. Ummmm....so basically my H is responsible for getting our 2 youngest to and home from school (the school is 1 block from our house) and his work, which he works from home and my count is that he works what would be considered a half day to most, makes more money than me but pays very little to the household. I am extremely resentful, but then remember that I have chosen to stay in this relationship which means that to me, it is my responsibility to give my all for my family regardless of what he does. I do my best to live MY life no matter what my H does or says. As you know, there are days that this is so hard, close to impossible, but I do try my best to not let "his ups and downs" control my and our kids' lives.
My H knows that I, rightfully so, am exhausted and in his "nice moods" acknowledges all that I do. I am not sure if this answers your question but this is how I dealt with the last episode...this past weekend, on Friday night I leave the house to take my S15 to the gym. As I get in my car, our neighbor comes over and asks if we have gotten a notice from the HOA about all of the weeds in our yard, as they did and they had noticed that ours was worse than theirs, we had not but I am imagining one coming. As a side note, I mowed our grass 3 weeks ago, got yelled at for doing so at 7 pm (clearly I am doing it for attention from the neighbors and not because it was close to 100 degrees out during the day) and my H told me at least once a week since that he would cut the grass that week and do the weeds, which looked like they were taking over the rocky portion of our yard, so I was not to do them. When I got back from taking our son to the gym, I told my H what our neighbor had said and his response was that I am welcome to do so, that he is too busy and will not be doing anything with the yard, that its been that way for awhile and I need to step up. I wanted to yell back at him and justify, but instead turned around and walked away (though I will admit that I did say under my breath something not nice about me doing everything and him doing nothing!...don't do that part) and asked my kids if they wanted to play a game. He ignored me for the rest of the night, and I continued on trying to enjoy my night with the kids and not show my aggrivation. The next day, my h left for the gym and the kids and I left for my D11's basketball tournament. I sent my H a text to let him know where the kids and I were, and invited him to the games (the game schedule is on our shared calendar, but for some reason he needs an individual invitation to any of the kid's games). I though I was being nice by doing so, but got an onslaught of awful texts saying that its too late for my invite, that he is seeing patterns in me and he thinks that I am recording him so he thinks he needs to start recording me, that I am mean and I lie, and the onslaught continued. My response was "I am sorry you are feeling this way, but as usual, I won't respond to over the top accusations." They continued, and my response was "I am sorry you are struggling" (I know that you are supposed to keep it about you only, but thats what came out), his response was that I am crazy and need a lot of help. I responded "I am sorry you are struggling, I love you", he responded that I need help and a heart...and I stopped responding and his responses stopped as well. I continued to act regular the rest of the day when we got home and he ignored me, trying to glob on to our 2 young kids and buy their love by taking them to an arcade while my 2 oldest and I did the yard. Less than 24 hours later, he tells me how much he loves me and thanks me for everything that I do.
The only way that I can keep myself sane, is to step away when the craziness begins and continue to remind myself that this is his issue, I have done nothing wrong and the last time I tried to "talk" things out with him, things only got worse. I have been told by an old therapist to say "The most loving thing I can do for you right now is to walk away", then walk away every time the cycle begins.




