I'm 35, married for nearly six years to a police officer here in Florida. We met ten years ago while I was in the police academy. Right after I graduated I was in a car accident and broke my back and severely injured my neck, which ended my career pretty effectively before it ever began.

In the beginning T was wonderful. I recall going to work the night after our first date and telling a co-worker "I think I just met the man I'm going to marry". Understand T is my second marriage, I have three children ages 10, 11 and 15 from my first marriage. T is the only father these kids have ever known, my daughter (the eldest) remembers her "sperm donor" (her term not mine) but she calls T Dad. From the get-go he was there for the kids, buying them birthday gifts and basically taking over fatherly parental duties, even though he still lived with his Mom at age 27.

After we had been together for about a year we moved in together, about six months later I had my accident. T encouraged me to not even try to work (which was admittedly almost impossible, I was bed-ridden for about eight months) and we lived on his salary. When our lease was up on our house his Mother proposed that we move in together, because she could not do the upkeep on her home and to take some of the financial burden off us from my medical condition. The schools were much better so we agreed. I had little knowledge of his Mom other than knowing that she was volatile and a hoarder-since I was a hard-wired clean freak the idea was I would stay home and clean the house up, do the necessary work needed (the house hadn't been taken care of by T, his Mom or his 23 year old brother who had never held a job, since his father died of heart failure in 2000 nothing had been done and the house was in really bad repair on top of the hoarding) and then she would cede the house to us. We took over the payments and all other household expenses.

About six weeks in she went nuts, drained T's bank account (he had her on his account for some reason I still haven't figured out) and called the police to try and have us arrested on child abuse charges because we refused to allow the kids outside to play-except there was a hurricane making landfall about eighty miles away . The officer that responded would have taken her to jail if T hadn't stepped in and used his work influence. I couldn't handle the stress and moved myself and the kids to an apartment. We had basically nothing left other than my meager savings and I simply couldn't handle the stress. T moved with me to the apartment. I started a sit-down job that I could do working for a large banking institution and we were doing ok, he had no contact with his Mom whatsoever. We married about a year later. I had also started a side business selling used books on Amazon and was doing very well for myself. T started making noises about wanting to own a home again, and because I was doing well financially I found and paid the down payment on a lovely house. I eventually quit my job to work for myself full time.

T was involved in every bit of the process of the house, since it was being refurbished by the seller we were able to pick out colors, tile, etc. I asked over and over if this was what he wanted, and told him over and over that he could say the world if it was too much stress and he told me everything was fine, that he loved the house and couldn't wait to move.

About six months after we moved in I became very ill, the doctors thought I had MS and I was hospitalized frequently. My relationship with T dissolved along with my business, since I was too ill to take care of it and he refused to help, saying he had no idea what to do despite my pleas to teach him. Without my heavy income the house payments were high for just his income, and he again refused to allow me to go back to work. On one particularly bad week we were fighting, I went to take a shower and passed out in the bathroom. He took his computer (he was an avid video gamer and devotes every spare moment to his games) and moved back to his mothers home. I was devastated, but I made an appointment with a couples counselor and he agreed to come. During that appointment he was extremely combative and told the therapist that the house was all my idea and that he wanted nothing to do with it, that he blamed me for all our money troubles because of my illness and that he did not want to save the relationship. Despite that he wanted to come home for some reason, and despite the therapist telling me to let him go that he was unstable I let him come home.

There was more fighting. He put his service revolver in his mouth, threatened to kill himself then took all the other guns in the house and piled them into his truck to leave. I cut him off on our street and refused to let him leave without first relinquishing the weapons...in turn he called the police and told them I ran him off the road. I was scared to death he would kill himself, and around this time I started to fall in to a deep depression. The doctors were still unsure what was going on with me and my life was just falling apart. We lost the house and moved into a more modest place and were doing better, despite me going through three surgeries inside a year. At the end of that lease here comes his Mom again, saying she is about to lose her home. I told T no way-I wasn't going down that road again. She said she would move to an apartment if we would save the house. I said no. He said either I moved or he left me. At the time I had just had disk replacement surgery in my back and was looking at another surgery in about three months, I couldn't work. I couldn't even walk again yet. So I caved.

We moved back to the house, true to his Moms work she moved out...to an apartment less than a block away. She refuse to take any of her belongings out of the house and its been almost two years, the garage is still full of her stuff. She had two 100lb dogs that she asked me to "babysit" while she went to work...that was over a year ago and the dogs are still here. She thinks its my job to cart anything she wants over to the apartment and refuses my attempts to get her to go through her belongings with her, saying she doesn't have the time. On new years of this year I sat T down, told him I couldn't live this way any longer and that I wanted to give his Mom a six month window to take control of her dogs, and that I was going to start carting her stuff over to her making it clear that I would dispose of whatever she didn't want and help her go through the rest. He told me that if I did this he would throw me out, even going so far as to say "if its you or the dogs I choose the dogs".

I've had six surgeries in the past year. They just found "masses" in about eight parts of my body and a new one just appeared in my lung, the side effect of that has been six cases of pneumonia. My middle son is autistic (aspergers) and my youngest was diagnosed with seizures last month. I'm at my wits end, I can't see a way out. I don't think my marriage will survive anything that happens and I just needed to vent this, because more and more I find myself contemplating suicide. Tonight T reminded me that besides the kids I have no family and that "no one but him" gives a (expletive) whether I live or die. The sad part is that I don't think he does either.

I've started a bank account of my own and am funneling money into it. I'm looking for a job but have no idea how I'm going to keep one. I have a degree and I'm highly intelligent (at least in matters not of the heart). Meanwhile T gets meaner and meaner to the kids and meaner and meaner to me. Every doctors appointment I have is laced with insults and seems designed to make me feel worse, my primary care doctor told me point blank not to bring him back with me or he (the doctor) will end up socking him in the nose.

I had to get this out, this is the first time I've written it all down. I don't expect anyone to read the whole thing, but I thank you for at least letting me vent.