Considering separation from Disabled partner

AnotherUserAcc wrote: »

I'm the OP but having technical difficulties with my account. In the meantime I put together this reply:

Well I clearly wasn’t expecting a pat on the back but I am a little taken aback at the level of vitriol here.

That said - most of it is at least somewhat constructive and I have certainly decided against the letter. Not that I expected to just hand it over and walk out, I was thinking of leaving it with her having spoken to her face-to-face.

Relate is something I will be looking in to.

There appear to be a few misunderstandings here I would like to address:
Firstly this is a highly complex situation (like any family) and putting every detail on here in the first post would end up being a novel. Unfortunately people like to tend to fill in the gaps with their own interpretations.

Fortunately I’m not in a fragile mental state as some of these comments could push such a person to do something very highly regrettable and perhaps people need to consider the impact (like I am from what I have taken away from the comments so far).

The children will not be carers. We have had a carer (my sister) living with us for the past 2 years and it will be a 24x7 live-in carer that we will have moving forward. She is leaving due to depression. Prior to this we briefly had an agency and then before that we had my mum and mother in law - neither of which were physically and mentally able to continue.

My wife is perfectly mentally capable to continue her parenting role and for me to take the children away as I am more ‘capable’ would likely destroy her which I do not want to do. Being in a wheelchair with physical impairment doesn’t mean you can’t be a mummy.

Taking another job will be tricky as I doubt there are many jobs that will have me at home for 60% of the year (far more than most parents) while also allowing my family to continue living in a large house in the south east of england with a commensurate mortgage. The property needs to be large to accommodate 3 bedrooms (including 1 for a live-in carer).

My expectation is that I would continue to pay the mortgage until the kids are 18 along with spousal financial support and fully covering the children’s expenses.

I will be living within half a mile and hope to have the children living with me for as much of the 60% of the time I am not away with work. They will likely see me as much as they do now and have done since they were born.

My wife was diagnosed while we were engaged and we got married 2 years later. The nature of MS is that it his highly variable and when we married you would not have known she had the condition but within 6 months we had her first wheelchair and I quit work shortly after to become a full time carer.

We barely survived on carers allowance / income support and just about kept hold of our house during the next 2-3 years and I did end up with significant depression during this time.

She was in a worse state than now and fortunately (10 years ago) she was given chemotherapy as a medical trial which made a remarkable difference to pretty much self sufficiency (while still self-transferring herself to a wheelchair).

When we conceived our first child she has been medically stable for a number of years.

Her ability to self-transfer went about 6 months in to that pregnancy but was otherwise relatively stable other than that up until about 3 years ago and it has been a general decline since then.

Point taken about the clinical nature particularly of my second post. The reason being that I cut&paste the email I sent to a couple of agencies. There are practicalities and as a third-party, it is important they understand what our requirements are before we end up interviewing every single agency out there to be told at the end that they can’t help (this happened to us a couple of years ago).