I (M32) am struggling to forgive my wife (F32) after years of built up resentment after multiple job losses & lack of doing her part around the house. How do I get past this?

Throw away account.

We’ve been together since 2012 & have been married since 2018. She initially went to school to teach k-12 art. I pared this down quite a bit after realizing how long it would be if I didn’t. But it’s still quite long so I apologize up front but appreciate any feedback.

She was fired from her first teaching job in 2017. It was a private school for troubled youth, (mental issues, emotional issues, witnessed or suffered abuse or self harming etc). Tough gig for a young gal still wet behind the ears. She was fired for potentially putting the kids in harms way. But some of these reasons seemed shady, felt like the director had it out for her.

But we just flushed it & the end of summer 2017 we moved a couple hours away. She spent all summer after being fired just sitting around the house watching Netflix & Hulu. Spent money we didn’t have. Doing no cooking or cleaning or anything.

The 2017-2018 school year she worked as a para professional in the new town. Making less than $11/hr and just enough hours to be considered full time (35hrs). I finished my last year of school and was working part time as well. Money was extremely tight.

The 2018-2019 school year she got hired as an art teacher at the high school. It was a huge relief, we expected this to stick for years. The spring of 19 she got non-renewed & was forced to resign. It was devastating, it had happened again. She claims she had no idea why & wasn’t aware of any issues. That they never went over her evaluations with her for her to believe she was doing anything wrong or under performing.

She once again spent the summer sitting around the house doing nothing. Worked part time as a server, that was about it.

We had agreed that she take night classes to get a new certification to teach elementary. So she spend the next two years working as a para again while going to night classes. I let the lack of house chores go since she was busy with school & work.

In 2020 we bought our first house in a small town 30 minutes away where I worked full time for the last couple years. She student taught at the elementary school & was offered a job there the spring of 2021. This was perfect, it was exactly what we had envisioned when we made the move.

In the two years she attended night classes she also worked at some locals bars as a server. After a couple summers one wouldn’t hire her back, one she quit in a huff with no notice, & one she was fired. I didn’t like it but whatever, they were always meant to be throw away jobs.

The first year at this elementary school (2021-2022) went fairly well & was given a second contract. We only needed to sign a third to be “tenured”. Her second year (2022-2023) came with a new principal along side an only second year superintendent. They did her dirty, didn’t support her with a terribly misbehaved class, actively took away discipline measures, then used her as the sacrificial lamb. They non-renewed her because of poor grades. At 8 months pregnant with our first I might add. At this point I was about sick of the teaching career & I wasn’t going to take it lying down. I brought the school board president to our house to tell him everything they had swept under the rug to protect themselves. (He passed away of a heart attack 2 weeks later & nothing came of it. It died with him)

2023-2024 she got a job at an even smaller town school 25 minutes south. The year went very badly, another set of terribly behaved kids. A para that didn’t come into her classroom ever when she was scheduled to be there to help if need be. She wanted to quit, I told her this could be her last chance & to stick it out. She took her issues to the superintendent (he ran this particular school, not the principal). She didn’t like how the conversation went & resigned in a huff.

This made me pretty angry just doing this without having a discussion about it again. But part of me felt hopeful. If this was the final nail in the coffin for teaching, maybe we could finally move on to other jobs and finally find some stability for once.

The summer of 2024 she lands a job at the local bank as a teller. Decent pay, great benefits (fully covered family health insurance & a great plan, HSA, dependent care FSA, profit sharing, 401k, 8 weeks of fully paid maternity leave after the first year) no nights, no weekends, all the holidays. It was everything our growing family needed. We weren’t going to be rich but with me now making $55k we could live plenty comfortable while still paying for two kids to be in daycare full time. So March of this year, she became pregnant with our second.

Everything seemed to be going well outside of her and one of her co-workers not getting along very well. We had finally let our hair down a little bit and put new countertops in the kitchen, a new dishwasher summer of 2024 just to name a few. Nothing crazy but not minor either.

Then when she goes back to work her first day after the Easter weekend, the bank fires her.

For me, this was the straw that broke the camels back. I thought for sure we were going to find out that this was just a teaching thing. Maybe she wasn’t meant to be a teacher. But not even a year into her bank job, she’s fired again.

Now a precedent has been set. It’s not just teaching I have to worry about, it’s anything & everything. And now I can’t help but question every last job that ended poorly, which had basically been every single one in some way shape or form. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is a pattern. And we have a very well established pattern.

Now she’s 6 months pregnant & has been looking for a new job for 3 months. She’s been completely ignored, passed up on after interviews, etc.

This time it changed me, I’m not just disappointed & resentful. I’m livid. I’m disgusted. It’s unattractive & repulsive. The animosity I feel toward her burns me up inside. And it’s only gotten worse as time goes on as she continues to not land a new job. I’m questioning if she can actually help support our family or if she will continue to actively hurt us. She has spent once again, another summer unemployed and doing little to nothing around the house. Kid still going to daycare full time since we thought it would help her job hunt and find something quicker.

I’m so filled with resentment & animosity, that I just don’t know how I can get past this. She seems to have lost her opportunities to work a normal 8-5 and now will be stocking shelves on Saturday evenings while everyone else is home with their families. It was everything our family needed & she just can’t make it work or get out of her own way. I don’t know what to do.