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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Living separate lives never gets better, only more distant. I’m flummoxed you wouldn’t divorce in this situation. Surely it’s better for your children to grown up with a loving relationship modeled for them.[/quote]
OP here. One additional factor weighing against divorce for me is that while we're together, I get to regulate who is around my children. DH's family is so trashy, hateful, racist and DH is so weak and ineffectual that he has and will continue to stand by while those animals are racist towards my children. Short of fighting him for full custody, which is not guaranteed, divorcing him would just mean my kids are exposed to his family with no one to protect them. I don't want to save myself at their expense.[/quote]

I am a black woman, raised by a single mother (who was divorced) and now married to a spouse whose parents were married but didn’t seem to get along for years and tolerated each other.  So I feel like I relate to your post in many ways: I grew up with a parent who chose to divorce rather than stay in a bad marriage “for the sake of the kids,” my spouse’s parents chose the opposite, and I’m black so I get the race thing, and I also have a kid and sometimes think about what divorce would mean in terms of sharing custody.

Were it not for your husbands complete inability to stand up for his children’s identities to his family’s racism,I would absolutely say to divorce because it’s better to model happiness alone than misery stay together.  But I think it’ll be much more damaging to their psyche long term to have them spend half of their time with a racist family and a father who either doesn’t defend them or who believes the same than it would be to grow up with parents who show no affection to each other.  So I’d suggest that you get individual and may couples therapy to figure out how to tolerate each other without resentment until they are in high school, when they can really choose who they want to live with, and then divorce. [/quote]

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