I saw this thread for the first time this morning, and welcome any and all input from the gentlemen who have lived these experiences.
My husband and I have been together 15 years. Until recently, we lived next door to my in-laws and ran a family farm/ranch together with them. In November we conceived our first child together (with the help of a surrogacy agency, so it was very much planned and a long time in the making).
The relationship between my husband and his parents had always been toxic and complicated in ways I just couldn’t put my finger on. In December, they came to us and demanded we buy them out of the farm within 90 days, if we wished to keep it.
It was a shitty thing to do, especially since we already had long term contracts in place for succession. Still, we started down the road of figuring out how much we could afford and what we wanted to try to keep.
On Christmas Eve my husband had a complete meltdown that was way out of proportion to the issue at hand. It got so bad, I was worried he would harm himself. On the other side of the meltdown, he finally admitted to me that his two older siblings had started raping and molesting him when he was around 7, and did not stop until his sister left for college (he would have been around 13). He said he told his parents, and they did nothing.
Giving his parents the benefit of the doubt that maybe they didnt understand the magnitude of what their child was trying to convey (maybe he didn’t have the right language to express it so young), I confronted his father when they returned from celebrating the holidays with their other children. He simply told me my husband had been making up those wild stories his whole life, and no one knew where they came from.
I told him that, for all my husband’s faults, I had never caught him lying to me about a single thing in nearly 15 years, and this actually explained a lot about why he acted like a crazy PTSD survivor only where his parents were concerned. I told him unequivocally that I believed him, and that if he wanted to be paid for his farm and did not want legal action taken against his other children, he would stop contacting my husband, put his head down and keep his mouth shut until the sale was closed…and never come back.
Fast forward 10 months… things have generally been better, but my husband has now had 4 bouts of being deeply depressed (briefly, but intensely). When he gets like this, I worry he might harm himself. He also expresses during these down times he wants to quit and sell everything. Buying the farm was staggaringly expensive, and we only did it because he expressed it was his passion in life and what he wanted to keep doing. He feels like a failure, and has very little interest in our now 3 month old son. He told me during his last meltdown that I was the only thing in life he was sure he wanted- the baby is difficult and not what he thought parenthood would be, and he is having regrets.
He promises to get help when he is extremely down, but as soon as he recovers enough to think clearly about who he might call, that promise is forgotten. I am angry that he does not follow through with getting help, but I also understand there are limited quality resources available in such a rural environment (not to mention, zero anonymity). He feels overwhelmed with work, and because of the nature of the work does not feel likr he can make an appointment in a bigger city several weeks in advance and keep it.
Are there online resources or books that any of you have found helpful? And, do you have any suggestions for how I can best support him without enabling him?
At this point, after the last meltdown, I told him that we are done spending money buying things for a business he cannot commit to keeping unless or until he puts some sort of action plan in place for getting ahead of these meltdowns. I told him I didnt care whether it was therapy, or a support group, or books, or an online community- but just trying to sort it out in his own head wasnt cutting it. I told him it was not fair to ask me to continue to sink all of our financial stability into the hope he will recover when he isn’t following through on his promises, and that both the baby and I deserve, at minimum, a safe, stable place to live.
I don’t know if this was the right move, or if drawing that line in the proverbial sand will cause more harm than good. I know I love him and want our relationship to work, but there has to be some healing somehow, if we want our son to be raised in a healthy, balanced household.
