Sorry if this is posted to the wrong subreddit. Just let me know.TLDR: My marriage is toxic. We have two very young kids. I don't know know what my next steps are.My wife (F38) and I (M50) have been married for four years. We have two daughters, 3 year old and 10 month old. We both absolutely adore our girls. They are the center of our universe. My wife and I, however, are not doing so well. She constantly berates, criticizes and attacks me because I'm not doing the right thing at the right time. This morning was a good example. The girls woke up around 8am and our oldest said she was hungry. Fine, so I said "I'm going to take a quick shower". I figured since my wife had been laying in bed playing with the girls for the last 30 minutes, I had 10 minutes to take a shower. WRONG! After the shower, my wife lays into me about how I'm selfish and always thinking of myself (which is not true - everything I do is for the girls). She says that I should have asked her to take a shower first so that she could go down and make breakfast first. I figured that since she had been laying there playing with the girls for a half hour or so, I had time to grab a quick shower. Apparently not. So for the entire morning, in front of the girls, while she's preparing breakfast, she lays into me about how "she's all alone" and "it all falls on her" and "I don't care about my kids", etc. etc.. This despite the fact that many times I've asked her to show me how to wash the clothes and prepare their meals. Her response is "you have no common sense - if you don't know how to do it, you'll never get it" (or something like that). Basically, whenever I ask her to show me how she likes stuff done, she grimaces and says "nah, I'll do it". This despite that fact that I stopped doing anything for myself. I gave up any hobbies that I had before kids and all I do all day is housework on the weekends and whatever plans my wife has cooked up for the weekend. No more football, no more tennis, no more exotic travel, no more nothing. And I'm happy to give it up. I really don't care anymore, but it irks me that just because I made the erroneous judgment of not asking if it was an opportune time to take a shower, I get labeled as "selfish" and only concerned about myself. Its gotten so bad that when I work from home on Fridays (because there might be an opportunity here and there to take a break from work and help her out) I get constant badgering about when I'm going to be done with work for the day. I've tried to explain that this is the year I need to make partner at my firm and I might require some extra hours, but she just says "work all the hours you need from Monday through Thursday". Friday, Sat and Sun are for house stuff. One day she actually asked me "what do you do up there when you work from home? Like really... what? Why aren't you helping at home?". Instead of dismissing this ridiculous question, I went into defensive mode and tried to explain all the things I had to do for work, which fell on deaf ears.Another example... yesterday, she painted a wall in our oldest daughter's room. She initiated it, planned it, has painted walls in other rooms before, done the work, etc. Well at one point, I handed her a knife to cut off the painter's tape and it was dull on one end. About halfway through the job of removing the tape she says "don't we have a better knife? this one is not cutting the tape right and the edges are looking bad". I said "let me take a look" and figured out that you could flip the blade around to reveal a sharper side. Well, hang on to your hats... this set her off. "How could you give me a fucking blade that wasn't sharp? You just ruined the job!" (the job actually turned out excellent – so much so that she posted it on facebook). That didn't stop her from berating me for 30 minutes about how I'm clueless because I should have given her a sharper blade. This despite the fact that just one year earlier, I installed crown molding in our house all by myself, the job came out looking amazing, we saved a bunch of money, and I didn't even get a "gee, that looks great". It was just "ok, are you done, let's go on to the next thing". I'm not saying I require affirmation from her to know that I did a great job, but it annoys me that anytime anything goes wrong, I'm the idiot and I'm the clueless one.These were just two examples of things that are happening on a daily basis. All of this playing out in front of our kids.Now some facts about her (that she herself has said):She hasn't slept much since our second was born. She is definitely sleep deprived. We are trying to sleep train her (that's a whole separate thread). I know sleep deprivation can cause serious issues and I accept that. The last couple of days, my wife has been sleeping in the other room so that I can wake up and try to comfort our baby back to sleep and not bother my wife. It seems to have been working the last couple of days, and my wife got some decent sleep.She admits that she jams more stuff into her to do list because she can't just "sit around doing nothing". So instead of just focusing on getting through this tough time, she adds stuff like painting the room to her list, causing all sorts of stress.She has blamed her anxiety on the fact that we are in a terrible financial situation. I've tried to explain that I make about $290k a year and our net worth is about $600k. She discounts that as "fantasy", even though she admits she doesn't understand personal finance. She doesn't understand how assets and liabilities work, but all she knows is we're in trouble. I had to cancel my $8/month spotify account because she thought it was irresponsible of me to spend money on that stuff.I travel 4 days a week for work, which she says places a lot of burden on her. I agree and have proposed that I get a lower paying job that's local so I can help in the evenings. She refuses to entertain that because she likes the free vacations that I get from the hotel/airline rewards points and more money. She also claims that I would be getting home too late to help (even though she doesn't even know what kind of job I would get).I've asked her to get couples counseling and therapy for herself. I think it would help. I saw a therapist after my first divorce and it helped me. I think therapy is a great way to maintain your emotional health. She thinks it would be useless and even criticized me for proposing the idea thinking that I was doing it for selfish reasons. Not sure exactly how that's selfish, but she somehow made the leap to that conclusion.She admits that she yells at our oldest daughter too much and feels guilty every night when she goes to bed. Whenever I work from home, all I hear downstairs is yelling and scolding and my oldest daughter yelling back at her.I have begged our wife to hire a nanny to help out. We have no family or friends in the area. I lost my family (parents and only brother two years ago) and her family lives in Easter Europe. She doesn't have a support system in the US, where we live. She refuses saying we can't afford it and she would end up doing everything herself because she insists on perfection. I said we should just hire one until the #2 goes to preschool – not for the rest of their lives. We’re talking a couple years. She insists we can’t afford it.She is hyper-focused on organic everything. She wants everything to be perfect for our daughters. She's a perfectionist and any deviation from perfection incurs her wrath. She bought a Berkey water filtration system because she doesn't trust the local water system (we live in one of the three richest counties in America - not saying that's a guarantee of purity, but it isn't like we live in Flint). She insists on making everything from scratch. Everything. This is time-consuming and all I hear are complaints about how she never has time for herself.So I'm left pondering some questions, and would appreciate any perspectives from this community:Should I insist on couples therapy? Should I wait until #2 is weaned and sleeping through the night before insisting on it? Maybe once my wife can sleep at night, things will get better? If I need to insist on it, how do I get her to agree? If we wait, I'm just concerned about toxic patterns setting in and becoming impossible to fix later. I'm also concerned about the damage to our kids watching Dad get pummeled on a daily basis. If a therapist were to ask me what i want out of couples therapy, I would say "I just want the yelling to stop. I gave up a long time ago on "romance" or "sex" or "intimacy" or "friendship". I just want civility. That's all.”Is it time for divorce? I can't imagine staying married to this person. We hate each other and our oldest notices it. If its time for divorce, should I wait for our second daughter to be weaned from nursing? I have no idea if the fact that she's still nursing would influence the custody decision, but it scares me to death the idea of not seeing my daughters every week.I've read a ton of scientific studies that indicate that children of divorced parents don't do as well in life as children of married parents. What I haven't seen is a comparison of "children of divorced parents" versus "children of parents that stayed together for the kids and are in a toxic situation". Does anybody have any sources of studies that compare these situations? This is the most important decision of my life and I cannot screw this up.Now a couple confessions I want to make:I fought so hard in my life to get to where I am. I was raised in a poor neighborhood to humble parents, but I have an MBA now and work for one of the largest firms in the world. I think I've done pretty well, and it bothers me that my wife, dismisses me as a loser and useless. I can't believe that I'm running around taking orders from this person and having my career the subject of belittling WHEN WE ARE LIVING IN AN AMAZING PLACE WITH A NICE HOUSE BECAUSE OF MY PROFESSION. After one year living with her previous husband, they had a net worth of $10k which she is so proud of. After four years with me, we have a net worth of $600k, but we are in "terrible shape". I don't want to sound like I'm bragging about my net worth. I'm not. My point is that we are on an upward trajectory, and somehow, I'm screwing everything up. I'm just annoyed that this person that doesn’t understand the difference between an asset and a liability is passing judgment on my career and accomplishments.I've been told before that I just need to "man up" and stand up for myself. I just don't understand how you "stand up for yourself" with someone that is hysterically angry all the time. Am I supposed to fight back and yell back at her? Where does that leave us? Non-stop shouting matches in front of the kids? I just feel backed into a corner. I can't fight back because the kids will see a horrible example. I can't just sit there and take it because the kids will learn either that its ok to be abusive to your spouse or its ok to just sit there and take abuse from your spouse. I feel trapped with no good outcomes.I could write forever, but I need to get some work done. Any thoughts are appreciated. via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2ie5cRX
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