Living Together While Separated Is Surprisingly Worse Than You Think

I want out so bad.

As I type this article, I’m shoveling my favorite overpriced chocolates down my throat like a starving peasant eating gruel.

After years of a shitty marriage, I told my husband Joseph last year that I wanted out. I told him I wanted out in the middle of a fucking pandemic. With our children struggling with life as it is, I opted for a Parenting Marriage. That’s where both parents switch to coworker mode and live under the same roof for the sake of the kids.

It’s the least-worst option when two parents split up.

At first, it sucked. Badly. Lots of melodrama on Joseph’s part, lots of crying, and lots of guilt-tripping. As crappy as it was, I felt more and more confident each day with this decision.

It got better. Until I realized, it only got better because we defaulted back to our state of marriage, minus either of us being able to walk in on each other naked. That also meant I had to deal with his temper tantrums and after the last straw, I told him I could no longer tolerate living in a house where I could ever be yelled at again by another adult. Ever.

And again, it sucked.

Finally, Joseph told me he wouldn’t fight anymore about splitting up. He asked what I would be okay with emotionally and I suggested we try Nesting. That’s the next-least-worst option; the children stay in the house while the parents swap out. Anyone with kids knows that it’s a hell of a lot easier for an adult to pack and go anywhere than it is to do so with kids. I once went away for a long weekend with nothing but two t-shirts, clean underwear, and a stack of magazines in my carry-on after I had kids.

I didn’t want to do anything until after mid-June. My children’s lives are garbage thanks to Covid. No playdates, absolute boredom, and school that vacillates between a 100% virtual model to a hybrid one. I could suck it up for a few more months until then.

Until tonight.

I can’t. I really can’t wait until June anymore. I want out now.

The past few weeks, my Mom Guilt has kicked in and I’ve stepped it up when helping my children with schoolwork. My son has autism and has anxiety-laden meltdowns. My daughter is behind academically; she gets extra intervention tutoring from school as well as tutoring from an overpriced teaching facility a few days a week.

I’m able to do this because my boss passed away and everyone at work tiptoes around me.

It’s a full-time job, trying to keep my children on top of schoolwork. Today is Wednesday and I worked with my daughter on a project due tomorrow...that we started on today. We worked on in between her school intervention tutoring and her offsite fancy-pants tutoring. It was like pulling teeth to get her to use a marker for the title of this damn thing. She’s struggling.

Fast forward a few hours and after the kids are asleep, Joseph comes in to complain how I don’t answer his texts. I told him I didn’t know what to write when he sent me the screenshot of her fancy-pants tutoring center’s test scores; I’m of no opinion other than, “we paid for this so she needs to keep going”.

I bring up the project that I worked with her on this afternoon. I show Joseph the Flipgrid (aka, a simplified version of YouTube) that other kids in her class have done. Theirs looks like MBA-level work in comparison to our daughter’s.

Joseph begins critiquing the project. I explain to him how I had to distill parts of it down because she didn’t get it while still making sure she followed the scoring rubric provided by the teacher. He kept going on and on while I kept defending my “creative” decisions surrounding her shitty project. Finally, I say “then you do it with her then”.

Your Honor, let the record show that’s when things went to hell in a handbasket.

He makes snarky comments then storms out of the room. From downstairs, he’s cursing and ranting about how I attacked him.

I have no patience for that shit. From the top of the stairs, I tell him, “you were berating me and pointing out what a horrible job I did, how is that attacking you?” Joseph goes on a swearing tirade at me.

This new version of me is all about boundaries and all that healthy-living shit. I tell him that cursing about this is unacceptable. Bad move. He steps it up. With every other word being an s-bomb or an f-bomb, he tells me how I “always” do this.

“I’m not tolerating this. There is no excuse to be swearing or talking like this,” I tell him. Joseph blames me, saying that he’s swearing and getting mad because of my attitude. Finally, he tells me “you can leave”.

If you’ve never had someone you share a residence with angrily tell you, “you need to leave” repeatedly, you don’t know how terrifying those words become. Because it’s not a suggestion. It’s a thinly-veiled threat. Joseph has told me this in various ways over the past few months. In my fight-or-flight brain, it translates to: if you don’t leave, I’m going to make you.

I tell him that I can’t live like this anymore. That I can’t wait until June. That this has to change now. He comes up the stairs to tell me again how appalled he is that I attacked him for his suggestions and that I’m a “piece of shit”.

To recap, in less than 10 minutes I’ve been sworn at, told to leave my own house, and called a piece of shit.

The funny thing about developing a spine and self-worth: you see things clearly. I thought, “you berate me and criticize me but when I push back by telling you to do the work, you tell me you were attacked? And that you have every right to treat me this way as a result? That’s some gaslighting bullshit right there.”

I’m not stoked that I helped propel the argument but I have no regrets about my behavior. I didn’t escalate or cause aggression by swearing. I didn’t blow things up to “you need to leave” levels. I didn’t name-call.

Joseph storms downstairs again. Our son comes in, rubbing his eyes asking if he can sleep in my bed. I tell him that I’ll walk him back to his room. While my son drifts back to sleep, I silently cry in the masterful way that I’ve done for years. The kind where it feels like I’m swallowing a bomb but I keep my mouth shut the entire time, the only movement is my chest as I push back sobs.

It’s 11 pm when I finally leave my son’s room and I sit down at my desk. The same stupid desk I’ve been sitting at for almost a year because my bedroom is both my home office and my prison. Thanks again, Covid!

Joseph comes in with a death stare at me as he stomps from the bedroom to the adjoining bathroom. He typically washes up our other bathroom; this is a melodramatic act of defiance. He swishes Listerine and loudly spits in the sink.

“So, we’re selling the house,” he says while standing across from me. “Umm…we…are?” I reply.

“No, that’s a question,” Joseph says.

“That wasn’t a question. That sounded like you were telling me that we are going to sell the house.”

“Sorry. I’m asking you. Is that the next step? Are we selling the house?” he replies.

I explain that I wanted to wait until June to try Nesting but at this point, we’re not modeling healthy behaviors for the kids. Joseph argues that we’re not modeling anything good by splitting up.

Throughout the post-argument-aftermath discussion, I keep repeating that we just don’t work anymore. That it would be ideal to model good behavior for the kids but we’re past that point.

“We tell the kids all the time when they’re fighting that they need to walk away and go to separate rooms. That’s what we’re doing now,” I tell him. Joseph rants about the extreme cost of renting. He’s not wrong, Southern California is absurdly expensive. I can live in my 4,000 sq. ft. house for $2,600 per month or I can rent a tiny condo for $3,500.

Is renting ideal? It’s not. But in the absence of his insane commute and after-school childcare fees, we’re still netting a positive each month. And this would be temporary. Joseph questions me, not understanding what I mean by “temporary”.

“Who knows what will happen when people get their Covid shots. When things open up, what happens to real estate and renting? What happens to our jobs? Will you be commuting?” I don’t mention that if he commutes and I have the children 99% of the time, that means he’ll owe me enough in child support that I can afford to keep the kids in this house. Before anyone blasts me, I don’t determine the child support amount. The California courts do. From what my lawyer has told me, there’s some formula and it’s not up for debate.

I tell him that children don’t need a big house to be happy. Living in a house with a pool isn’t a requirement for happiness or for them to live a good life.

Joseph’s face suddenly crunches up. I know this face. It’s the expression he makes when he’s about to melt down to cry. I’m a stone-cold bitch because this no longer phases me. You don’t get to call me a piece of shit and then expect sympathy from me minutes later.

He tells me how he’s scared for an unknown future. When I point out that I’m in the same boat (minus my excitement; unknown sounds much better than the status quo), he cries that I still have my family. “What are you talking about? They’re in another country and you know that no matter what happens, I will never tell them that we split up. So there is no support or help of any kind coming from them.”

Next in the queue of his tears, Joseph tells me how he doesn’t even know if he’ll have a job. He’s in a fickle entertainment industry line of work. I’ve always operated under the notion he’ll get laid off any day. “See, this is why I don’t say anything to you. Because I know you’ll say that kind of thing and it’ll just upset me,” Joseph sniffles.

“How much worse is it than any other time?” I ask. He tells me that it’s pretty bad. “Did you update your resume?” I reply. Joseph begrudgingly tells me that he didn’t. “Then I guess it’s not that bad then,” is all I can say. I’m not providing false hope that I’ll stick by him if he loses his job. Not anymore.

At this point, it’s almost midnight and my patience for the conversation has gone out the window. I ask if he’s okay with me talking to our real estate agent tomorrow as well as research Airbnb options (as if I wouldn’t have done that anyway, without his permission). Joseph tells me he cries almost every day.

“Do you talk to a counselor about that?” I tell him. I’m not prying too much into why he’s crying as much as how he can find a solution himself to feel better. He mumbles that he uses an app he gets through his work insurance but he’s not very good at using it.

This is the Pity Party stage of our arguments. It’s when Joseph bemoans his inability to make his life better. His crappy use of a mental health app isn’t an excuse to me anymore. I tell him he should find a real therapist to talk to and that I’m happy to watch the kids or take them out of the house if that’s what he needs to make that happen.

Finally, I push the conversation to an end by apologizing for how the night went. I don’t apologize for my behavior; I simply say that I’m sorry the night went awry. Joseph then gives me a sorry-not-sorry apology; this is his fault because he knows better than to try and have conversations with me at night because of how I react to things.

I refuse to get sucked into his passive-aggressive apology. We’re past the point of me caring.

It’s 4:25 am. I should have gone to bed. But writing calms my brain and I wanted to get this out of my system.

I feel confident that I honestly tried to make a Parenting Marriage work. But when your quasi-ex-husband stands over your daughter’s farm project while calling you a piece of shit, eventually there needs to be a stake in the ground.

Joseph can throw every guilt trip in the book at me. For us, that’s the children and finances. It worked on me in the past. I know this because that’s the guilt trip I used on myself for years.

Being in a miserable marriage is like having a dull, aching toothache. You don’t realize until it’s extracted how much agony and pain you were under the whole time.

Fuck the Novocain. I want this marital tooth ripped out now.