My partner and myself have been together for 2 years, though I have known him (not closely) for around 8. Early in our dating I fell pregnant, we now have a nearly 8 month old daughter, she is beautiful. However, my partner has shown me so many red flags since early on. The worst yet is that late in my pregnancy - around 27 weeks he started to yell and scream at me over small things, disagreements or your typical argument. he is extremely volatile, emotionally unstable most times, he can’t handle any constructive criticism or any sense of heightened emotion. A number of times, I had a newborn baby cradled in my arms as I was nursing her and he would be screaming over both of us, at me. This has happened several times, he also gaslights, manipulates, uses coercive control tactics, threatens suicide and says he is going to/wants to kill himself because of me, and financial abuses me and holds money against as a means to make me feel bad. He also does not help AT ALL with our daughter. He will pick her up, say “coke give daddy a cuddle” and hold her for 10 minutes. And that’s essentially it. I am a first time mum, and he has other children to other women. He hasn’t had an angry outburst for around 6 weeks now, but I feel so on edge and afraid when I know he is coming home, or when I know it’s the weekend coming and he will be home. I have constant anxiety and I am always dreaming of leaving with our daughter, as I feel it’s so unhealthy to be in a home where this behaviour happening, but I also want to set an example for our daughter. I am so afraid to leave because I worry that I would need to share custody while our daughter is so young, he is clueless and really inattentive. Will do things like fall asleep at the drop of a hat when he’s meant to be watching her, will cover her pram in blankets on a hot day to ‘keep our the light’, doesn’t understand safe sleep and thinks all of the tiles around safe sleep environment are ‘stupid’ - just very senseless with parenting and he has past addition problems, he was an alcoholic until our daughter was 3 months, I said unless you stop drinking I’m leaving. He stopped but I know he’d likely start again if I did leave. I don’t want to keep her from him, and I’d ideally like supervised visits as frequently as he likes, or limited time spent at his house, not overnight. I fear leaving because I don’t want to put her at risk by him having shared custody while she’s so young. I feel so depressed and trapped.
