One woman, writing anonymously, detailed how one ordinary day led to the end of her marriage. Their son was two years old at the time, and the woman didn’t see it coming.
However, in her essay, she concedes that she should have, adding, “Nothing changed for my husband with the birth of our kid. He dreaded telling me about his ideas.” She spoke of her husband’s “stubborn reluctance to tell us when he was going to participate in our lives.”
“On that morning, he was in the shower, and his phone kept pinging. I checked it, to see if it was something urgent. It was a group message between his sporting club mates about a ‘do over’ that night, after a big post-match session the previous night. ‘Don’t think I can make it tonight. SWMBO will say no.’ I was bemused — what did ‘SWMBO’ mean? It presumably alluded to me — but what did it stand for?
And also — he hadn’t asked me about that night, so I was annoyed he’d blamed it on me. I went into the bathroom with the phone and asked my husband what ‘SWMBO’ meant. He wasn’t mad I’d looked at his phone. He was totally unmoved by having to explain the message to me.
‘It means ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’,’ he said, casually. I felt like I’d been slapped in the face.”
The woman was devastated by this message. After all, she is not a strict mum to her husband, who tries to sneak out of the house like a teenager. Without paying any attention to his wife and child. In such a relationship, there is no room for respect for the partner and a team approach to parenting.
She said, “I was never, ever, going to kiss, let alone sleep with, a man who called me that after 10 years together — even after becoming the mother of his son.” The author of the post realized that she and her child deserve better. It was a difficult decision, but after a week she took the child and left.
We hope that this woman’s life has turned out well from here on out. Here is the story of another of our readers who found tampons in the house that were not hers and set up a surveillance on her husband.
