Reply to Lonely, Empty Marriage After Dead MIL

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][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.  [b]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. [/b][/quote]
OP here. You totally get it. Right now, my children are too little to protect themselves. The oldest is only in second grade. Once they're old enough to stand up for themselves or refuse to see the trash on DH's side of the family instead of being taken against their will, I'm so done with DH. But there are years and years before that happens and I'm just trying to figure out how to get through long days looking at this man. I feel as if he suckered me into what he KNEW would be a toxic dynamic and then helped bully me. Valentine's Day just passed and I actually had trouble looking at him because I was so angry at how this is my life. No love, no romance, just married on the books and rearing children together.[/quote]

You can still be a regulating influence on your kids even if they are spending time away from you with the racist paternal family members. Consider the message nthat you're sending them while continuing to stay with the father.

I totally get the unique pressures you're under with twins and a child with special needs, though. You haven't directly cited that as an issue, but I can only imagine how hard it would be a raise a child with special needs as a single parent. I know I couldn't handle my ASD child by myself.[/quote]

Her reason for that is a prolonged custody battle would be upsetting to the child, not that carrying for a special needs child on her own would be difficult.[/quote]

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