Marriage Counseling, What led us to that point....

I can't really explain in a few short sentences how having Dylan and the fact he was colic along with having another son 11 months older than Dylan, still having to work and figuring how to DO IT ALL, going through nearly 4 years of infertility, my husband being laid off 5 months after I found out I was pregnant with Dylan, affected my relationship except to say that it turned my marriage into something I contemplated getting out of. 

I was overwhelmed with doing it all and feeling the only time my husband helped out enough is when I got really mad and pretty much had a breakdown, then he'd go clean stuff and not talk to me.  I knew a couple months after Dylan was born that I had post partum depression and I felt a huge lack of compassion and help from my husband to help me with the situation since I didn't want to take anti-depressants.  Because even an anti-depressant wasn't going to cook dinner, pay my bills, and clean up the house.  I needed my husband to step up in a HUGE way that he was not prepared for so I could eliminate as much of the petty stuff that was somewhat petty but had to be done (clean clothes, washed bottles, grocery shopping, cleaning the floors, soothing Dylan through the night so my body could feel a full 6 hours of sleep).  I was learning to cope with everything a little bit better but not perfectly and then we went to California for a week in June and it was awful.  I can't tell you how hard it was for us to travel with 2 infants but it was so far from relaxing.

The last day we went to the beach and I reached in to get my Iphone while Chad was playing with Monkey in the Ocean and the first image on the phone was porn:(  Short story, my husband was so mad at me that he decided it was fine to look at porn and PURPOSELY leave it in the diaper bag for me to find.  On PURPOSE.  I can't tell you how crushed I was that day.  And we still had to head back to my sister's house and get ready to head to the airport and let me tell you, when the plane took off and the lights were shut off, I silent cried like I had never cried before.  I was shook to the core by his intentional act of trying to hurt me and it was something he'd never done and I just sat there for 6 hours on a plane thinking, 'What am I supposed to do? I can't stay right?  Because if I stay this is going to happen over and over and I don't deserve this and I know I can't pretend it didn't happen.  And why now??  Why AFTER we had kids did he do this?  Why couldn't he have done it before and I could have started a life with someone else and not had to bring kids into it?"  We got home that night, slept in separate rooms, I cried myself to sleep, got up, we ignored each other and finally that night he came back to bed and as soon as he turned out the light, I said, "I can't do this anymore.  I don't think we should be married."    And for the next couple hours we both cried and talked and agreed that we couldn't go on this way anymore.  During that long talk I told him I did not want to hear a single reason why what he did was my fault and why I was responsible for it because we are adults and this was not going to be a blame game.  I told him either we go to marriage counseling or we file for divorce.  The next morning we called and made our first couples counseling appointment for 2 days later.   I'll write more later.