I have been married to my husband for 11 years and we have two kids, 5 and 9.
He is Japanese and was raised very differently than I was. His upbringing included verbal and physical abuse from his parents. I was raised by a mostly absent father and while my mom was great, when my parents divorced (when i was around 10) she got very busy with a new career and relationship and I felt neglected.
My husband and I lived in Japan for most of our relationship but moved to the US for his job transfer a year and a half ago.
After we had kids his anger issues became more apparent. Our son, our older child, has a very volatile and stubborn temperament. When he gets angry he won't back down. I have tried many ways of dealing with his behavior and have found that nothing works but to let him calm down and then to talk about what happened after. My husband however behaves in a similar way to my son and won't step away from the situation. He becomes enraged and threatening, calls our son names, and has become physical with him, grabbing, dragging, hitting and kicking.
When I get between them to try to diffuse things it gets worse and he turns on me, blaming my parenting for our son's behavior. I have found that things settle down faster if I stay out of it, although of course I intervene if my husband is getting physical.
Since we moved to the US, but may move back to Japan at some point, my son attends Japanese school on Saturdays in order to keep up to his Japanese grade level, and my husband helps him complete his homework, which is substantial, over the rest of the weekend. My son hates doing schoolwork and often shouts and gets mad when he is asked to do it. He is easily frustrated, forgetful, and has a hard time with writing assignments. I suspect he has some kind of attention deficit or processing difficulty; I myself struggled in grade school and only really came into my own academically in university.
My husband just sees our son as an "idiot" "moron", or lazy, and says as much repeatedly during their homework sessions.
I don't work outside the home because of moving around frequently for my husband's career, and living outside of my home country makes it legally difficult, plus the logistics of it with the kids' schedules makes it hard. However I do everything when it comes to the house, including repairs, landscaping, taking out the garbage, and all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, bill paying and so on. But my husband feels that I don't push our son hard enough during the week with his Japanese studies when he is working until the kid's bedtimes.
On Thursday evening my husband had a huge fit about my son's homework, dragging him from his room to the dining room to do it and giving him a carpet burn in the process, then kicking him (not hard, but still) as he lay on the floor. When I got in between them he began to berate me, saying how he's jealous of my life where I just sit around and eat and go shopping, and that I spoil the kids. He went on and on. There may be some grains of truth in what he says; I have gained about 30 pounds since we moved to the US, thanks to stress and comfort eating, and since we have bought a home I have been buying things to decorate it, although not to excess and I mostly shop at thrift stores and bargain hunt to keep costs down. I work very hard in the home. But the way he went on and on made me feel like he doesn't value me or my contributions to our family at all, that he has little love or respect or regard for me.
Today he scolded and threatened our son for about and hour while he sat and sobbed. I wanted to go to him but I know it just makes things worse so I stayed nearby with our daughter in her room, ready to intervene if it escalated.
I am so worn out with these repeated explosive episodes. If we didn't have kids and my husband behaved this way I'd be long gone. But when he's in a good mood my husband is great with the kids, plays with them a lot, and they adore him. If I were to leave I would prefer to move back to my home country where I have family support, but my husband would go back to Japan and probably the kids would rarely see him. Plus I'd be a busy single mom with little time for them. I think they'd end up resentful of me for separating them from their father.
I'd appreciate your thoughts or advice on my situation
He is Japanese and was raised very differently than I was. His upbringing included verbal and physical abuse from his parents. I was raised by a mostly absent father and while my mom was great, when my parents divorced (when i was around 10) she got very busy with a new career and relationship and I felt neglected.
My husband and I lived in Japan for most of our relationship but moved to the US for his job transfer a year and a half ago.
After we had kids his anger issues became more apparent. Our son, our older child, has a very volatile and stubborn temperament. When he gets angry he won't back down. I have tried many ways of dealing with his behavior and have found that nothing works but to let him calm down and then to talk about what happened after. My husband however behaves in a similar way to my son and won't step away from the situation. He becomes enraged and threatening, calls our son names, and has become physical with him, grabbing, dragging, hitting and kicking.
When I get between them to try to diffuse things it gets worse and he turns on me, blaming my parenting for our son's behavior. I have found that things settle down faster if I stay out of it, although of course I intervene if my husband is getting physical.
Since we moved to the US, but may move back to Japan at some point, my son attends Japanese school on Saturdays in order to keep up to his Japanese grade level, and my husband helps him complete his homework, which is substantial, over the rest of the weekend. My son hates doing schoolwork and often shouts and gets mad when he is asked to do it. He is easily frustrated, forgetful, and has a hard time with writing assignments. I suspect he has some kind of attention deficit or processing difficulty; I myself struggled in grade school and only really came into my own academically in university.
My husband just sees our son as an "idiot" "moron", or lazy, and says as much repeatedly during their homework sessions.
I don't work outside the home because of moving around frequently for my husband's career, and living outside of my home country makes it legally difficult, plus the logistics of it with the kids' schedules makes it hard. However I do everything when it comes to the house, including repairs, landscaping, taking out the garbage, and all the cooking, cleaning, shopping, bill paying and so on. But my husband feels that I don't push our son hard enough during the week with his Japanese studies when he is working until the kid's bedtimes.
On Thursday evening my husband had a huge fit about my son's homework, dragging him from his room to the dining room to do it and giving him a carpet burn in the process, then kicking him (not hard, but still) as he lay on the floor. When I got in between them he began to berate me, saying how he's jealous of my life where I just sit around and eat and go shopping, and that I spoil the kids. He went on and on. There may be some grains of truth in what he says; I have gained about 30 pounds since we moved to the US, thanks to stress and comfort eating, and since we have bought a home I have been buying things to decorate it, although not to excess and I mostly shop at thrift stores and bargain hunt to keep costs down. I work very hard in the home. But the way he went on and on made me feel like he doesn't value me or my contributions to our family at all, that he has little love or respect or regard for me.
Today he scolded and threatened our son for about and hour while he sat and sobbed. I wanted to go to him but I know it just makes things worse so I stayed nearby with our daughter in her room, ready to intervene if it escalated.
I am so worn out with these repeated explosive episodes. If we didn't have kids and my husband behaved this way I'd be long gone. But when he's in a good mood my husband is great with the kids, plays with them a lot, and they adore him. If I were to leave I would prefer to move back to my home country where I have family support, but my husband would go back to Japan and probably the kids would rarely see him. Plus I'd be a busy single mom with little time for them. I think they'd end up resentful of me for separating them from their father.
I'd appreciate your thoughts or advice on my situation
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