Posts
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Dear Help,
Accept my condolences on your family's loss. It sounds like this sad situation has shaken everything up. You're right that your husband is struggling with his grief, but there's still a result for his bad treatment of you. My recommendation is that you go for counseling by yourself. He may eventually join you and even if he doesn't, you could use the support. You're stressed too. Just having four young children makes for intensive parenting, not including the loss you've suffered. Sadly for you, this is a double loss--your father-in-law and your husband due to his grief and stress.
You're right that the situation isn't good for your children. Seeing you accept verbal abuse is abusive to them. Check out the recent literature on child trauma. Maybe your husband is so consumed in his own grief that he can't see the harm his actions are having, but this needs attention before the family falls apart.
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Years ago when my daughter was small, she developed an illness that required longterm medication. She hated the taste of it and would run when it was time to take her dose. To get her to swallow the medicine, I actually had to pin her between my straddled knees to the floor and force it into her mouth.
Talk about trauma...and I don't mean trauma for her! She has no memory of the experience, but I sure do.
Not long ago, this same now-adult daughter had a kitten hanging around her apartment, clearly without a home or owners to care for it. Our family loves cats. But because she already has two kitty-buddies, she couldn't take in this new feline, no matter how cute it was. To her grave sadness, she knew she had to capture the kitten and deliver it to a shelter where someone else would hopefully adopt it.
This bruised her soft heart and she felt like she was actually betraying the kitten who let her close enough to capture it. Love is like that. Sometimes loving things look like mean things.
Loving others can be very difficult and we do things we hate having to do. No one talks about it much, but parenting involves quite a few of these moments. Incidents when the adult in the relationship has to do difficult things for the kids' own good. (There are parents who do bad things to their kids, claiming pure motives, but most of us really aren't that twisted.) Most of us love our kids with all our hearts and want only the very best for them.
Sadly, this requires us to insist they eat their vegetables, finish their homework and pick up their toys, none of which they like sometimes and none of which they want to do. But it's part of the parenting job description to insist on those things that are good for our kids, even if the kids don't like them.
We have many, many examples of parents and others treating kids badly--this is largely what Child Protective Services watches out for--but we also have an often unacknowledged reality to this parenting job. Sometimes we have to insist on our children doing things they don't want to do. In some cases, the kids have annoyed us to the point that following through isn't that hard--the little jerks deserve it! But sometimes we just hate being the bad guy, the one who administers punishments and lays down the law.
This is particularly true when the other parent is only too glad to be the good one, the fun parent, the one who never makes the kids do anything they don't want to do. But you know the truth that we all do things we don't want to do. Kids are smaller and weaker, but they still need to learn the lesson that others care most about actions and they'll get a lot further by taking care of responsibilities even when these aren't fun.
We all do things we don't want to do.
You, after all, probably go to work, sometimes at a job that doesn't value you or pay you near what your worth, but you do it to put food on the table and clothes on those kids you love so much. Some lessons are hard, but children need parents who love them enough to be the bad guy, to introduce them to shampoo and broccoli.
They may want cartoons, sugary cereal and toys strewn all over. They need you to follow through.
