Who Has Time For Hobbies With All of These Appointments?

I've been seeing a therapist for a while. In addition to that, my wife and I have been, together, seeing a different therapist who has a lot of experience in dealing with situations in which one parent has a disability and the kids are acting out. This second therapist we sought to help us with our parenting because we’re apparently doing a horrible job.

There were a few simple things the therapist told us to do in order to help our marriage because the marriage is the foundation of the family, so this will eventually help our family dynamic. One was having a date night at the bare minimum of once per month. Another was sitting together and being together for a mere fifteen minutes in front of our children, without allowing the demands of the children or them demonstrating cage fighting techniques on each other to interrupt this time together. With weeks behind us since that those suggestions given, we haven’t done either.

We haven't done the second one because when I'm home and awake and the kids are home, my wife takes the opportunity to take time to herself.

We haven't done the first one because my wife prefers to put off doing chores until my family has our kids. OK, so my wife doesn't want to go out. How about some lovemaking? No, why would she want to that more than once per week? It's only minimally enjoyable for her because of the medication cocktail she'll be taking the rest of her life. Well, at least I can catch up on some desperately needed sleep, right? Uh, well... no. My wife had errands for me to run. That's my fault, I will admit. Instead of thinking of what would make her life easier, I should have told her "HELL NO I will not run errands, I'm going to get some sleep. You run the errands while I'm working the kids are still with my family." But I didn't.

My wife knows I'll eat one way or another, so she doesn't make a point to care if I eat.

My wife doesn't care if I'm extremely tired and not working to my potential. It doesn't cross her mind, I'm, sure, as long as the benefits are paid for and the bills are paid.

She could turn it around (and has) to say I have no idea what it is like living in her body. Which is when I want to scream with every ounce of energy I have left, "YOU CHOOSE TO GET MARRIED AND HAVE CHILDREN. JUST BECAUSE YOU WANTED IT DOESN'T MEAN YOU SHOULD HAVE SET UP THIS SITUATION FOR CHILDREN!!!" She thinks the kids should just suck it up and have a limited life because their mother is disabled. Because their mother chose to become a mother knowing she was disabled and then experimented with treatments, leaving her a lot worse off than when we were dating.

The issues with the physical disability are bad enough, but there is no way I would have married her and had children with her if I knew of her mental health history (more of which has come out in the therapy) and her apparent need for ongoing medication for that. I didn't know because neither she nor her family were open with me about it before I married her, probably because they knew I wouldn't have married her.

I've been getting closer and closer to yelling the statement in caps up there two paragraphs up. The closest I came was when I congratulated her on getting what she wanted (to be a wife and mother), at the height of one family meltdown or another.

She has been saying to me what I've been thinking about her current effectiveness as a wife and as a mother, but when she says it I don't have the heart to explicitly agree. Instead, I tell her what she does right/well, or I ask her why she is saying what she is. I neither agree nor deny her statements. I don't want to deny them because, well, they're true, or at least I think they are.

Even though we don't have the money for it, we've been more or less replacing her with surrogates. We haven't sat down and verbalized that is what we're doing, but it is pretty much what we've been doing, slowly but surely. Of course, this does not extend to sex. Her responsibilities as a wife and mother are being increasingly offloaded onto others. Well, actually, mostly mother. I can survive without a wife, so the needs of the kids are what take priority.

At this point, without some sort of dramatic improvement in her physical condition due to finding the right treatment (or reverting back to the treatments she used to get), I don't see how we're going to avoid moving in with someone or having someone move in with us.

How does a therapist help a man deal effectively with staying in a difficult situation that he's in because he fell for fraud and misrepresentation? How does a therapist help a man deal with the fact that his own government will force him to support, for the rest of his life, the person who perpetrated this? How does a therapist help a man deal with the fact that all of this is cheating his kids out of the childhood he intended to give them?