Alright, ol' BryM needs some input from you gals out there that are married, engaged, or otherwise spoken for. The catch is, you need to have some years' experience in the aforementioned "spoken for" state.
Here's the story: I've got a family member who's in quite a predicament. A little history first though...her first marriage was a disaster. A couple of years into it, she found out that he was a drug addict. He went through rehab a few times, but always went back to the drugs. Five years into the marriage, she planned to leave but then ended up pregnant with her second child. So she stuck it out but finally had enough a few years later. She left rather abruptly, and barely managed to escape with her sanity....and her children. The next couple of years was a VERY messy custody battle that she thankfully won. Fast forward another three years..she meets an awesome guy who's in the Navy. He's about as clean cut as they come, had a good head on his shoulders and has NO desire to take anything stronger than Advil. They end up getting married several months later, much to the joy of the entire family. We all love this man as though he'd always been a part of the family, and he loves us just as much.
As the next few years go by, the entire family falls more in love with this guy...and for good reason. He's an awesome father to the kids, he's an excellent provider (even on a military salary!!) and things are just swell all around. Don't get me wrong...they're like any married couple...they have their problems here and there, but nothing too major...most DEFINITELY nothing on the lines of her first marriage especially!
Year five of the marriage, things started to change. Even though this awesome guy loved his two step children, he still wanted to have a child of "his own". Now, given the fact that my family member is seven years older than him (she was by now 35), she wasn't all that anxious to have another child. She had two, and she was happy with that. Besides, she knew that having a child at the age of 35 would mean she wouldn't be done raising kids until she was well into her 50s. I'm quite sure you moms out there can probably relate to that! Well, this was a feeling that apparently her husband couldn't relate to...he wanted a child and that was that. Period.
During this time frame, my family was still in the middle of dealing with the loss of my mother. Her illness and death had taken a toll on ALL of us, especially this particular family member. Needless to say, she had enough on her plate without the added pressure from her husband to have a child.
One day, the husband comes home and says they "need to talk"...he then proceeds to explain that he's always wanted to be a father and that even though he loves her kids as though they were his own, he still wanted a child that was REALLY his own. He then announced that if she would not have a child with him then he could not guarantee that their marriage was going to survive.
Yes, he really said that. Yes, it's at that point that she SHOULD have packed her bags, cut her losses, and hit the road. HOWEVER.....what do you do when you are madly in love with the most terrific guy you've ever known and what's he's asking really ISN'T all that horrible? She convinced herself that she was being selfish about the baby thing and agreed to try and get pregnant. Big mistake, I know. TRUST ME, I know. Even though she wouldn't admit it at the time, SHE knew it was a huge mistake.
Then she got pregnant. It was the most horrible pregnancy I've ever seen a woman have. She was big as a house...folks, she gained almost 80 pounds!! She's only 5'6" and normally 120 or so!! She was MISERABLE. She also turned into a total BITCH. Seriously! She was in a HORRIBLE mood the ENTIRE pregnancy, and she made NO apologies whatsoever for it.
Then the baby came. Oh, the baby. Good lord. How do I begin to describe this child? Picture an episode of any tv show...a lady delivers her baby and when the camera cuts to the bundle of joy, it's six months old. Well, THIS kid looked like a 3rd grader! He had a full head of bright orange (picture Ronald McDonald) hair, weighed almost ELEVEN POUNDS, and came into the world screaming his head off and hasn't stopped screaming in the twelve years since! His head was as big as a basketball and his temperment as bad as Hanibal Lecter from those "Silence of the Lambs" movies. Normally, when people see a baby for the first time they're all excited and gush about how "adorable" the baby is....well, not with this kid. Most of us were rather frightened at first look. My brother asked her if she was POSITIVE that they hadn't switched her baby for some homeless child from the street.
From infancy into toddler stage, everyone in the family tried..and tried...and TRIED to develop a bond with this child. It just wasn't happening though. It was evident by the time he was three years old that something wasn't quite right. By the age of four, he was as big as an eight year old and had the most vicious temper you could ever imagine. No, strike that...you do NOT believe it until you SEE it for yourself.
Eventually, the child is diagnosed with some ailment that unfortunately is going to render him in the area of 7-8 feet tall with a very unpredictable temper and "underdeveloped genetalia".
As the child grows older, the problems become nightmares....HORRIBLE nightmares.
To complicate matters, the husband has since given up active duty in the Navy to pursue a career in the private sector. He's done quite well for himself and ends up making exceptionally good money...well over $100,000 per year before he ever hit the age of 40. Unfortunately, as is the case with a lot of folks who end up with a career that pays that well, it's been at the expense of his family. He's still an excellent provider (obviously), but the family member has been left to deal with the child all on her own. The episodes of the drama progressively get worse literally month by month until the family member has to quit her job as a mortgage loan officer to stay home full time to 'deal' with the child.
The child is now almost 13 years old. He is six feet four inches tall and weighs in at about 200lbs. He still has the Ronald McDonald hair and the "under development" I mentioned earlier. The temper issues have now begun to coincide with the whole 'typical pre teen' issues that most kids face, such as defiance of authority, lack of caring about school, etc etc etc. Now combining the 'typical' stuff with a kid who's already got issues to begin with is not just a BAD situation, it's now grown into a DANGEROUS situation.
Two weeks ago, there was a rather ugly battle that took place between the kid and the mother. She had to forcibly put him into his bedroom and in doing so came very close to throwing her back out. She's almost 50 years old now, so you can imagine the havoc that is wreaked on her body with having to deal so physically with this kid. After being put into his room, he punched the door so hard that it SPLIT the door. These aren't just any old doors...they're solid oak...something she'd specifically ordered when their house was built. Anyway, as he was punching the door, he started to flip out and was saying some pretty scary things. REALLY scary. To the point she ALMOST called the police to the house.
Here's where the even BIGGER dilemma comes into play. These episodes that have been going on for all of these years have been for the most part ignored by this woman's husband. In fact, he continuously tells her that "he never has any problems with the kid", so she's obviously just "not a good mother!"
Yeah..he REALLY said that!
If all of this isn't bad enough, part of this kid's "problem" is that he's also learned "the system"...and how to manipulate it to his advantage. The door incident? Well, during his boxing match with it, he skinned his knuckles somewhat. After things calmed down, the mother doctored it up and told him not to pick at it and not to remove the dressing until the next day when he cleaned up the wound. He asked why and she told him that if he picked at it and didn't keep the dressing fresh that he'd get an infection from it and it could lead to something more serious than just a few scrapes.
Two days later, the mother leaves to go to visit her sister in a different state. Her sister is very sick from years of battling with emphysema (sp?) and not doing very well. In fact, she's been so sick lately that the family member feels she'd better visit her sister while she can because it could be the last time she sees her alive. Before she leaves, she tells her husband to keep a check on the kid's scrapes because she'd caught him several times picking at it and taking the dressing off of it. She tells him that if he'd have left it alone it would have been healed by now.
The mother stays at her sister's house for a total of four days. When she comes home, she's barely in the door before the phone rings. It's the kid's school telling her that she has to come and get the child because of a "rash" that looks pretty bad and that they're afraid it might be staph. So she heads over to the school and low and behold, the kid has got some kind of funk over most of his body!! To the doctor's they go and he says it's not staph, but is a result of the kid scratching and such.
So the wife then calls her husband and asks if he had watched the kid to make sure he didn't scratch, etc. The husband says that he didn't because he had too many things to do for work so he'd spent the whole time she was gone hold up in his home office working. So she gets REALLY pissed off and reads him the riot act for not doing one simple but VERY IMPORTANT thing...at which point he tells her that she's a lousy mother because she went off on a trip when she should have stayed home to take care of her kid!!
To avoid exceeding Blogstream's bandwidth with, I'll try and get to the point. Anyways, this is just one of MANY MANY MANY MANY instances over the years where things like this have happened. The older the child gets, the less that the husband has anything to do with the raising of this child and the more critical he is of her. Just take my word for it..it's NOT a good situation at all.
So here's the deal. All of the stress of all the things that have happened over all of these years has finally pushed her to the breaking point. Literally. I've very concerned that she is thinking of doing something really drastic and really stupid. She wants out of the marriage, but since she doesn't have a job anymore, she has no money. She also has no where to go. She's completely dependent on her husband. She knows that a messy divorce would most likely have her ending up penniless. So she's stuck. Living in a house with a son she can't handle and a husband who doesn't really give a damn about her anymore. For those of you who are wondering...yeah, I'm pretty disgusted by this guy that I used to be crazy about who's now shown he's really just a prick.
For the first time in my life, I'm at a loss for sage advice. I've suggested coming up with a plan to get out...get a job, hide money away and start downsizing the bills as much as possible so that she wouldn't have to get screwed with half the bills in a divorce. Then when she is ready to leave she will be able to take care of herself. Of course, it wouldn't happen over night..it would take a while for her to be able to do all of this. The trouble is that even though she KNOWS that doing something like that is ideal, she's so far gone into her 'funk' that she just doesn't have the will to be able to follow through with something like that. In other words, she's damned if she does and damned if she doesn't. She's so low at this point that all she wants to do is retreat to her bedroom and watch tv. As she told me today, "there's no where for me to go, no money to get there, and basically no hope for the future....."
So...attached ladies....give me advice!! What would you do in a situation like this??!! HELP!!
There is nothing more infuriating than to take the time to write an entry and then lose it because of being auto-logged out!!!!! Yes, I know..I should have written the post in Microsoft Word, but I just didn't feel like it this evening! 
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