I know this is really long, and I appreciate anyone who reads it to completion. I wish I had the time and money to talk to a professional. I am a 40 year old married father of two. My life is so broken I don't know if it can be fixed. Let me tell you why:
My wife, whom I love, refuses to work. She has been diagnosed by a Rheumatologist with Fibromyalgia. She has also had bouts with chronic Pancreatitis. She says that she is in pain, primarily with her neck and joints, most days. It has a minor impact, if any, when she wants to do something, though. One of the biggest stress-causing things in my life is that a doctor, several years ago, told her she has something called Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. In a nutshell, this doctor gave my wife an excuse to sleep days, even though the doctor said it is something that can be overcome with some effort. She does not attempt to go to bed, most days, before 5am, she then gets up and gets the children off to school, then sleeps from the time they leave until 2:30-3pm. In truth, I suspect that the real reason she does not want to work is that she is uncomfortable with her physical appearance. She is very self-conscious and is unhappy with aging and her weight, and I believe she does not want to adjust her sleep patterns.
We make just enough money to scrape by, and it is daunting to me to have the full financial burden of our household on my shoulders. We can't afford health insurance, so we are challenged in even establishing a medical history solid enough for her to apply for disability, which would certainly relieve some of the financial burden.
She refuses to put enough work into our home to keep it from being an absolute pigsty. At any given time, one could walk into our home and find paper trash all over the floor and counters, the appliances are never clean, and there are piles of clothing and garbage that threaten to eat us in our sleep. She is a bit of a hoarder. My daughter's bedroom is unusable, and she sleeps on the couch. My wife cleaned it once, and then did not make her keep up with it. The house smells of pet urine. There is never a clean dish, glass, utensil, washcloth, or towel to be found. There are a multitude of items in our apartment that need to be urgently attended to by maintenance. She cannot manage to get the house clean enough, for a long enough period of time, for me to arrange to have these basic items attended to. Sometimes she will get motivated enough to attack and thoroughly clean an area, but it does not get maintained and while one area may be temporarily clean, other areas suffer. She lays the blame on our children, who have developed very bad habits of not picking up after themselves and not doing their daily chores to a satisfactory level, or not at all. Her idea of follow up with this is to wait until it is overwhelming and blow up at us, saying she cannot do it alone. I am very unhappy about this situation, but I work 50-60 hours a week, and I feel, as the sole breadwinner, that I should be excused from coming home and doing housework. When she worked, I was glad to do this kind of work. I am too stubborn to give in on this. I would rather see it like it is than to just do it myself. I should not have to, if she is not going to work. I then come home and get angry because she and the children have done very minimal, if any, work in the house.
Over the past couple of years, she has developed 'friendships' with some people online. I have caught and confronted her twice about some exchanges that I have found that are inappropriate for a married woman. I fear that she is still fostering these relationships and has just become better at hiding it from me. It eats at me. I know she is having inappropriate emotional relationships with other men. I do not believe it has become physical, and it doesn't matter. The fact that she is turning to other men to fill whatever void she has pains me greatly. I want to give her what she's missing. I do love her and I am truly in love with her, but the burdens she has placed on me, and I have foolishly accepted, of our entire household finances, these relationships, an unequal amount of discipline that I am charged with for our children, and the squalor I am forced to live in eat away at my compassion, my tenderness, my generosity, and, what I miss most, my excitement about being in love and married to her. It has damaged our emotional, spiritual, and sexual relationship.
My son is 17 years old. He is a very good-natured and well-meaning person. I don't know where I went wrong with teaching him respect for his parents and sister, and teaching him a work ethic. He will procrastinate until the very last second to do anything that is required of him. He then rushes through things and doesn't do a thorough and complete job. He will not do what is asked of him in regard to chores without constant hounding, and then he will not do it immediately or without a spirit of contempt.
We are challenged with his sister, and he feels that he bears an uneven amount of responsibility, and sometimes he does, more about her later. He is absolutely uninterested in moving his life forward. He has not expressed interest in getting his driver's license, and is absolutely not interested in getting a job. I fear that if we don't turn this attitude around and get him to stop putting things off until the last minute, he is going to have a very hard time with life.
He also, like most teenagers, feels he can do no wrong and the world is out to get him. He will argue until he is blue in the face why his position is right, regardless of if it actually is. He refuses to take responsibility for any mistake that is pointed out to him, opting rather to justify why he does what he does, no matter how wrong it is. It would be music to my ears to just once to hear him say: "I messed up, I'm sorry, I'll fix it." Instead, I get a myriad of excuses and justifications why he did not meet expectations. It's like he's expecting a pass or that expectations will be lowered for him if he presents the right combination of words. I don't know where this comes from. I work hard, I work long, and I always take responsibility when I make mistakes. I have tried, above all else, to be a good example of this to him. I am truly puzzled where this behavior has come from.
My daughter is also a huge cause of stress in our family. She is 10 years old, and she has epilepsy that is moderately well controlled with medication. She has, maybe, one seizure every 2-3 months when the medication is working as it should. She has been identified by the head of neurology at our children's hospital as a candidate for a surgical solution, but our neurologist believes we should control with medication for a while longer before we consider something as radical as surgery.
A large problem is that the medications bring are side effects. These make her very difficult to deal with. She can be very aggressive and hateful in the way she treats everyone in our family.
She absolutely will not help in any way in the house without a screaming fight. No amount of punishment, taking things away or corporal discipline seem to have any effect on getting her to change. She makes huge, terrible messes and refuses to clean them up. This places stress on all of us to have to clean up after her when she is doing things she shouldn't be doing to begin with. She will not respect any boundaries she is given and is constantly playing in my wife's makeup and wasting things like shampoo, dish soap, kitchen items, etc. It is infuriating because we don't have money to throw away like this. She breaks into locked bedroom and bathroom doors if it suits her and when she is corrected for it, she loses control and starts spewing hateful things at whomever is attempting to correct her.
She is constantly on some clandestine mission to do activities, experiments, and arts & crafts with household supplies that we need. It is a regular occasion in our house to be out of soap, shampoo, dish soap, cleaners, and my wife's personal items because she has taken and wasted or destroyed them. We have given her art sets and craft sets that she promptly loses interest in, loses parts of, and will not pick up. I am at a loss with this.
Lastly, her disrespect and venom are absolutely legendary. If she is asked to pick up a mess she made or do a chore, the screaming begins. She would rather tell us that she hates us and we are ruining her life that to pick up clothing that she left on the bathroom floor or wipe up a mess of Kool-Aid she left on the counter. It accelerates and escalates until my wife and I have to disengage from her for fear of losing control. She is absolutely insidious in that, I believe, she uses this to manipulate our household. I have truly wondered if she could be possessed with some of the things she does and says. No matter what we say or do to her, she does not care, and sometimes laughs at us for trying. It is hard to love her sometimes and I wonder, truly, if she may be better off to be committed for a time.
Finally, we will get to me. I try. I try so hard. I work my tail off for an unhealthy amount of hours each week to hold on to my job. My direct supervisor knows my position and he uses that to manipulate me into working these long hours by implying that my job is at stake if I don't. He is not stupid, he knows what he can and cannot come right out and say, and he knows how to push my buttons. I work in a field that requires a clean credit history, and over the last few years, I have been in a position where I have had to make decisions that have ruined my credit. I have sought to go elsewhere, and to change careers altogether. I would leave this job in a heartbeat, but with my education level, and my current credit situation, I cannot find a position where I can make a lateral move in terms of salary. We are stripped to the basics with our budget as it is. I could not move to a lower pay situation, even temporarily. I am stuck. I keep looking, but it's not bearing fruit. We have no buffer or savings or credit available for emergencies and I am scared to death that something is going to happen that could finally financially ruin us.
My parents, my wife's parents and the majority of our family in the generation before us is gone. We have no one to turn to for help in this way. I make just enough money to make us ineligible for public assistance, outside of health insurance for our children only. My credit is truly ruined and I cannot seek help from anywhere that I can find.
I am and was raised a devout Christian. I have, over the past few months, drifted away from God. Where once I was excited and enthused about attending worship, now I feel that He has forsaken me. I was really close to making a change in career and it fell through, I have prayed for years and years that the afflictions faced by my wife and daughter will be abated, I have prayed that our financial situation will improve, I have prayed that my marriage will grow stronger, I have prayed that my family will see things the right way and make better decisions, I have prayed that God will stir the feelings inside me and send me the Holy Spirit to strengthen my faith, I have prayed that God will remove the whisperings of the Devil in my ear, inspiring doubt and feelings of discontent, and it all seems to have fallen on deaf ears. I know in my heart that I am being an impetuous and ungrateful child, but my mind just tells me "what's the point?" It almost feels like I'm buying a lottery ticket. In my heart I know that someone wins, but my mind tells me it won't be me. It has corroded my desire to serve, and I have adopted old habits that I am unhappy with, like swearing and not working as hard as I could for His glory. I am ashamed at feeling this way, but I don't know how to correct it.
I write this today because I feel I am approaching a breaking point. I feel that there is going to be a point where this all becomes a crisis event. I want to avoid this, but I don't know where to start fixing it. I love my family and I love God. I need help. I am often tempted with thoughts that I should just pack up and leave and start over, or worse, that I could just throw in the towel altogether. Help me.
My wife, whom I love, refuses to work. She has been diagnosed by a Rheumatologist with Fibromyalgia. She has also had bouts with chronic Pancreatitis. She says that she is in pain, primarily with her neck and joints, most days. It has a minor impact, if any, when she wants to do something, though. One of the biggest stress-causing things in my life is that a doctor, several years ago, told her she has something called Delayed Sleep Phase Disorder. In a nutshell, this doctor gave my wife an excuse to sleep days, even though the doctor said it is something that can be overcome with some effort. She does not attempt to go to bed, most days, before 5am, she then gets up and gets the children off to school, then sleeps from the time they leave until 2:30-3pm. In truth, I suspect that the real reason she does not want to work is that she is uncomfortable with her physical appearance. She is very self-conscious and is unhappy with aging and her weight, and I believe she does not want to adjust her sleep patterns.
We make just enough money to scrape by, and it is daunting to me to have the full financial burden of our household on my shoulders. We can't afford health insurance, so we are challenged in even establishing a medical history solid enough for her to apply for disability, which would certainly relieve some of the financial burden.
She refuses to put enough work into our home to keep it from being an absolute pigsty. At any given time, one could walk into our home and find paper trash all over the floor and counters, the appliances are never clean, and there are piles of clothing and garbage that threaten to eat us in our sleep. She is a bit of a hoarder. My daughter's bedroom is unusable, and she sleeps on the couch. My wife cleaned it once, and then did not make her keep up with it. The house smells of pet urine. There is never a clean dish, glass, utensil, washcloth, or towel to be found. There are a multitude of items in our apartment that need to be urgently attended to by maintenance. She cannot manage to get the house clean enough, for a long enough period of time, for me to arrange to have these basic items attended to. Sometimes she will get motivated enough to attack and thoroughly clean an area, but it does not get maintained and while one area may be temporarily clean, other areas suffer. She lays the blame on our children, who have developed very bad habits of not picking up after themselves and not doing their daily chores to a satisfactory level, or not at all. Her idea of follow up with this is to wait until it is overwhelming and blow up at us, saying she cannot do it alone. I am very unhappy about this situation, but I work 50-60 hours a week, and I feel, as the sole breadwinner, that I should be excused from coming home and doing housework. When she worked, I was glad to do this kind of work. I am too stubborn to give in on this. I would rather see it like it is than to just do it myself. I should not have to, if she is not going to work. I then come home and get angry because she and the children have done very minimal, if any, work in the house.
Over the past couple of years, she has developed 'friendships' with some people online. I have caught and confronted her twice about some exchanges that I have found that are inappropriate for a married woman. I fear that she is still fostering these relationships and has just become better at hiding it from me. It eats at me. I know she is having inappropriate emotional relationships with other men. I do not believe it has become physical, and it doesn't matter. The fact that she is turning to other men to fill whatever void she has pains me greatly. I want to give her what she's missing. I do love her and I am truly in love with her, but the burdens she has placed on me, and I have foolishly accepted, of our entire household finances, these relationships, an unequal amount of discipline that I am charged with for our children, and the squalor I am forced to live in eat away at my compassion, my tenderness, my generosity, and, what I miss most, my excitement about being in love and married to her. It has damaged our emotional, spiritual, and sexual relationship.
My son is 17 years old. He is a very good-natured and well-meaning person. I don't know where I went wrong with teaching him respect for his parents and sister, and teaching him a work ethic. He will procrastinate until the very last second to do anything that is required of him. He then rushes through things and doesn't do a thorough and complete job. He will not do what is asked of him in regard to chores without constant hounding, and then he will not do it immediately or without a spirit of contempt.
We are challenged with his sister, and he feels that he bears an uneven amount of responsibility, and sometimes he does, more about her later. He is absolutely uninterested in moving his life forward. He has not expressed interest in getting his driver's license, and is absolutely not interested in getting a job. I fear that if we don't turn this attitude around and get him to stop putting things off until the last minute, he is going to have a very hard time with life.
He also, like most teenagers, feels he can do no wrong and the world is out to get him. He will argue until he is blue in the face why his position is right, regardless of if it actually is. He refuses to take responsibility for any mistake that is pointed out to him, opting rather to justify why he does what he does, no matter how wrong it is. It would be music to my ears to just once to hear him say: "I messed up, I'm sorry, I'll fix it." Instead, I get a myriad of excuses and justifications why he did not meet expectations. It's like he's expecting a pass or that expectations will be lowered for him if he presents the right combination of words. I don't know where this comes from. I work hard, I work long, and I always take responsibility when I make mistakes. I have tried, above all else, to be a good example of this to him. I am truly puzzled where this behavior has come from.
My daughter is also a huge cause of stress in our family. She is 10 years old, and she has epilepsy that is moderately well controlled with medication. She has, maybe, one seizure every 2-3 months when the medication is working as it should. She has been identified by the head of neurology at our children's hospital as a candidate for a surgical solution, but our neurologist believes we should control with medication for a while longer before we consider something as radical as surgery.
A large problem is that the medications bring are side effects. These make her very difficult to deal with. She can be very aggressive and hateful in the way she treats everyone in our family.
She absolutely will not help in any way in the house without a screaming fight. No amount of punishment, taking things away or corporal discipline seem to have any effect on getting her to change. She makes huge, terrible messes and refuses to clean them up. This places stress on all of us to have to clean up after her when she is doing things she shouldn't be doing to begin with. She will not respect any boundaries she is given and is constantly playing in my wife's makeup and wasting things like shampoo, dish soap, kitchen items, etc. It is infuriating because we don't have money to throw away like this. She breaks into locked bedroom and bathroom doors if it suits her and when she is corrected for it, she loses control and starts spewing hateful things at whomever is attempting to correct her.
She is constantly on some clandestine mission to do activities, experiments, and arts & crafts with household supplies that we need. It is a regular occasion in our house to be out of soap, shampoo, dish soap, cleaners, and my wife's personal items because she has taken and wasted or destroyed them. We have given her art sets and craft sets that she promptly loses interest in, loses parts of, and will not pick up. I am at a loss with this.
Lastly, her disrespect and venom are absolutely legendary. If she is asked to pick up a mess she made or do a chore, the screaming begins. She would rather tell us that she hates us and we are ruining her life that to pick up clothing that she left on the bathroom floor or wipe up a mess of Kool-Aid she left on the counter. It accelerates and escalates until my wife and I have to disengage from her for fear of losing control. She is absolutely insidious in that, I believe, she uses this to manipulate our household. I have truly wondered if she could be possessed with some of the things she does and says. No matter what we say or do to her, she does not care, and sometimes laughs at us for trying. It is hard to love her sometimes and I wonder, truly, if she may be better off to be committed for a time.
Finally, we will get to me. I try. I try so hard. I work my tail off for an unhealthy amount of hours each week to hold on to my job. My direct supervisor knows my position and he uses that to manipulate me into working these long hours by implying that my job is at stake if I don't. He is not stupid, he knows what he can and cannot come right out and say, and he knows how to push my buttons. I work in a field that requires a clean credit history, and over the last few years, I have been in a position where I have had to make decisions that have ruined my credit. I have sought to go elsewhere, and to change careers altogether. I would leave this job in a heartbeat, but with my education level, and my current credit situation, I cannot find a position where I can make a lateral move in terms of salary. We are stripped to the basics with our budget as it is. I could not move to a lower pay situation, even temporarily. I am stuck. I keep looking, but it's not bearing fruit. We have no buffer or savings or credit available for emergencies and I am scared to death that something is going to happen that could finally financially ruin us.
My parents, my wife's parents and the majority of our family in the generation before us is gone. We have no one to turn to for help in this way. I make just enough money to make us ineligible for public assistance, outside of health insurance for our children only. My credit is truly ruined and I cannot seek help from anywhere that I can find.
I am and was raised a devout Christian. I have, over the past few months, drifted away from God. Where once I was excited and enthused about attending worship, now I feel that He has forsaken me. I was really close to making a change in career and it fell through, I have prayed for years and years that the afflictions faced by my wife and daughter will be abated, I have prayed that our financial situation will improve, I have prayed that my marriage will grow stronger, I have prayed that my family will see things the right way and make better decisions, I have prayed that God will stir the feelings inside me and send me the Holy Spirit to strengthen my faith, I have prayed that God will remove the whisperings of the Devil in my ear, inspiring doubt and feelings of discontent, and it all seems to have fallen on deaf ears. I know in my heart that I am being an impetuous and ungrateful child, but my mind just tells me "what's the point?" It almost feels like I'm buying a lottery ticket. In my heart I know that someone wins, but my mind tells me it won't be me. It has corroded my desire to serve, and I have adopted old habits that I am unhappy with, like swearing and not working as hard as I could for His glory. I am ashamed at feeling this way, but I don't know how to correct it.
I write this today because I feel I am approaching a breaking point. I feel that there is going to be a point where this all becomes a crisis event. I want to avoid this, but I don't know where to start fixing it. I love my family and I love God. I need help. I am often tempted with thoughts that I should just pack up and leave and start over, or worse, that I could just throw in the towel altogether. Help me.
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