Feeling lost
My husband and I are in our 30s and we have been married for seven years with three young children under five. We both work extremely hard and still face some financial struggles; however I feel like we don’t really connect much anymore and we’ve been fighting a lot. One of the biggest issues has been his prioritization of his mom and dad over our family. For context, we moved for my job and it was financially still better than where we would have been and he got a job that is much safer where we are now.
We’re only really a few hours from my in-laws. In any case the move caused a lot of tension and my mother-in-law eventually called me a terrible mother. She said it’s because I sometimes get stressed with three young children and a full-time job and because I “stole the kids” from her. She’s apologized since but it still sticks in my mind.
There has been so much miscommunication and frustration that I didn’t even know he was planning to go to his parents with the kids overnight once last week to fix the car. He told me about this around 7 PM and I was worried because the car had issues and they were driving in dark areas where there’s lots of deer to get there so I voiced my concerns and said it didn’t seem safe. He called his parents to ask their opinion and once they said it was safe, he basically decided that it was OK to go. He framed it in a way that pitted me as a bad guy. He literally said I have to talk to my wife first, but he already knew my opinion. So again, this made it seem like if he said no, it’d be my fault because he essentially agreed and had done so with them before I knew of the plans.
He went and told the children and started packing their bags and I felt completely voiceless. I said, I thought being their mom would carry some weight in this situation. Without talking to me, he immediately locked me out of the room and called his mom to change plans, and essentially it became clear that it was me who didn’t want the kids to go, but again I was worried about their safety. The brakes were not working, and that was the whole reason he was going down there to get them fixed, even though we have plenty of great places here and we have the financial resources at the moment to fix them.
He also has a habit of sending his mom our private texts and screenshots if we’re arguing.
Maybe I’m the bad guy after all, but I feel completely defeated and like nothing that I say really holds any weight even though I’m his wife and the mother of his young children. Is this marriage doomed?