u/Astro_Blazed_Fox

My husband 30/M and I 28/F have been married almost 7 and 1/2 years and we are still struggling with communication.
I will be honest and say that it is primarily on my end, but even when I try or think we’re doing good it still seems to fail. We end up having a fight and we’re close to separating. I love him and want to make this work (we also have 2 young kids).
To give an example, today we took our kids to the zoo. My mom, 2 sisters, and niece met us there. A little while before we left our 1 year old was acting tired. My mom said something about how they’d probably both fall asleep on the way home (around a 45 minute drive). My husband and I made comments about how our 1 year old sleeping wouldn’t be a problem but if our older one fell asleep it would be a really rough night. I thought we had another conversation between just my husband and I talking about them sleeping on the way home and it was said that we weren’t worried about her falling asleep but we needed to keep our older one awake. So I wasn’t paying attention to our younger one and she ended up falling asleep. My husband says that the conversation between just us didn’t happen and he only said what he did with my mom because she thinks she knows more about our kids than we do (my parents are also a problem but that could be a whole other post). So he was upset that our 1 year old fell asleep cause she’s probably going to wake up multiple times tonight and that we didn’t agree to letting her sleep in the car. I thought we had talked about it and weren’t going to worry or prevent her from sleeping. He said that just because we concluded a conversation doesn’t mean that we are on the same page.
I just can’t seem to get this right.
How do I actually get better at communication? It seems easy and it should be straight forward but somehow I’m still struggling.