First, a little background history: My wife and I started young. We were engaged young, married young, and started our family young. And despite the odds and the nasty comments from relatives, we managed to not “end up in a trailer home” (in quotes because this was one of the aforementioned comments from a relative.
We did good for ourselves. We bought our first home, started our own business and then because of the business, sold our first home and moved into a bigger one that had space for our business.
Well, the economy took a crap and so did our business. Then we were stuck in a too-big home with a too-big mortgage that the business was no longer paying half of. So I got a weekend job. It was hard at first, but we managed. Then I began hating my full-time job. I’m miserable there.
So I applied to a college and began attending classes every weeknight in the evenings so that I can get into a career I love. It’s been about three years since that decision. Well, my wife is miserable.
She is a stay-at-home mom who is also attending school full-time, but everything of hers is online so it doesn’t interfere with her being home with the kids. In the beginning, she was in full support of my going back to school but now she makes comments sometimes like when I have to study and she wants to plan a family thing…”of course you have to study, etc.”
She says things like she’s tired of being the one waiting at home for the other. She’s tired of when she’s had a terrible day with the kids that she doesn’t have a partner who comes home in the evening so she can get out and re-coup. She hates that the boys are being jipped out of a family dinner each night. She also says that me being gone all the time is affecting how she mothers, her patience is wearing thinner and she’s constantly stressed out because there’s no start and end to her “workday.”
Then we fight because I ask her how she thinks I feel…I’m working full-time, going to school and then working another 12 hours over the weekend. I tell her to wait it out, that our situation will get better but she says by then she’s afraid she’ll have too much resentment. We’re trying to sell our house. I’ll be graduating in a year. She is almost finished with school. But I can’t get her to see that it will all be coming to an end soon.
She always uses the line “what if I’m dead by then?” (she started using this line after her friend was killed in a car accident about 9 months ago.) She says when the house sells, we should go our separate ways, but I can’t see how that could be better than our current situation.
What can I do? Are we past saving?
When it’s good, it’s reallllly good but then she gets into moods where she just resents everything I do.
I don’t know what to do, I don’t want to lose her but I can’t change our situation.
