It escalated to her throwing bottles at me.

[BlueJayS]

I'm not going to write paragraphs and paragraphs because I'm sure you've heard it all before so here it is in a nutshell.

I'm in my early forties.  My wife is in her late forties.  We have a nine year old son.

We've been married for 11 years, together for 16.

I've been living the rollercoaster life since we got together.  Idealization followed by devaluation.  Things were mostly tolerable, although clearly unhealthy, until our son was born and we moved house, at which point things got significantly worse.

Since he was born, I've done 95% of the child care for our son.  I was stay-at-home dad for his first two years, then went back to work after she lost her job. Even with her at home full time I still did the majority of the child care.  I'm fortunate enough to have a very flexible job that allows me to be home in the afternoons when he gets back from school.

In contrast she has never once -- not once -- organized a play date for him with another child.

After she lost her job she didn't look for another one.  She lives off my paycheck and her mom's savings (her mom is in an assisted living facility).

She had an affair about five years ago and subsequently blamed me for it.

She once threw me and my son out of the house because I got angry about her affair, telling our then five year old son that he would have to help me find a place to live.

We are both in therapy -- both in individual therapy, and also in couples therapy.  Couples therapy is basically her just complaining about how everything wrong in her life is my fault.  We have been doing couples therapy with a couple different therapists for years now. The elephant in the room seems to be that she has undiagnosed BPD and doesn't want to deal with it.

We talked about divorcing several years ago but didn't follow through (she asked me not to leave).

She is an alcoholic who drinks 1-2 liters of liquor a week.

Last week we had an argument which escalated to her throwing bottles at me.

I'm legitimately scared of what she might do if I try to divorce her.  But I really don't think this can go on much longer.

What now?

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How is day to day life right now?

[BlueJayS]

But she is acting out in a number of ways to try and hurt me, because she is angry.  For example:

Today we had our couples therapy session.  It's about 50 minutes long.  She is always, without fail, 10-15 minutes late to the session every week.  Today she was 30 minutes late.  Once she got there she did the usual -- called me names, told me that all her problems in life are my fault, etc. 

Tomorrow morning I have to get up at 6am to get my son to hockey practice.  I wanted to get him to bed by 8:30pm this evening.  (This is basically the only thing she does with him -- give him his shower before bedtime.)  When I came up at 8:30 she told me that he was going to be a while and that she would text me when she was done.  She then played around with our son for a while before finally getting him to bed (knowing that we both had to be up super early in the morning). While this was going on I could hear her telling him that "daddy would be angry" if he didn't get to bed soon. (I didn't get angry).

Later, she came in and told me that some maintenance work which we had just had done on a house that we own and rent out was my responsibility and that she would not contribute to paying for it.  Our finances are somewhat complicated.  We have a joint account, which is filled up every month by my salary and the rental income from the house.  I have a separate checking account which I put a few hundred bucks a month into for my own expenditures.  She has separate accounts that are mostly her mom's savings (since she's spent all her own savings instead of getting a job).  On rare occasions when our joint account is low and we have an unexpected expenditure she will move money from one of these accounts to our joint account.  She's refusing to do that this time, which leaves me on the hook for the maintenance bill (several thousand dollars) which will take a serious chunk out of my savings, which I'm worried about because I might need it for a lawyer.

Apologies, because I'm going off on a tangent now.  But that's basically my day to day life.  Either we ignore each other (which is basically fine), or she is manufacturing some new crisis.  My therapist recommended that I read the Walking On Eggshells book recently, which I did, and so I am starting to try and put some of the techniques I read about in there into practice.  (For example, try not to take this stuff personally; focus on making my own decisions; understand that I am in control of and responsible for my own actions, not her actions, etc.)

But I'm just getting started on that and while the information I've been getting from the book has been eye-opening to say the least, putting it into practice is not easy. So yeah, long story short, day to day life is okay until we have to interact, and then it's crap.