It’s not just the money. It sounds like she has family and friends around. If I had a support system around me, I could at least get back to school or be able to hold down a job and then I WOULD have some money of my own and I wouldn’t so freaked out about it. I’m also thinking of so many women who’s husbands are deployed overseas for months, sometimes years.
I have a good friend who’s husband used to do long haul trucking and she had two little girls at home. She had a routine down and a way she liked to do things on her own. When her husband came home and they spent time together, she was almost territorial and found herself treating him not like the husband and father, but like a visitor and the things he would do would bother her because she had the house a certain way and had the girls in a certain routine and felt he would show up for a few days every week or so and mess it up.
When you aren’t living day to day with someone it is really easy to resentful of the person and to get careless with the other person’s feelings. You are married, but in reality, living quite independent lives of each other. Coming back together and feeling like a couple is HARD.
I don’t resent my husband having a few beers and I don’t make him go out to a barn to drink them. In fact, I will have a beer as well, or share a bottle of wine with him and sometimes, even cuddle on the couch and watch a movie with him. We have rules and guidelines in the house about alcohol. No drinking before 5pm, not even on match day. (I know he will have a beer at the airport and on the plane, even if it’s around 10am… but he knows not to do it at home.) We’ll allow ourselves a glass of wine or a class of beer at dinner and then it gets put away until the kids go to bed. Once the kids go down, we’ll have another beer or two or finish the bottle of wine. No harm done. I still waking up bright eyed and bushy tailed for the kids in the morning. (Him not so much. He sleeps on the couch and will lie there until about 11am and we all have to tippy toe around him.)
I know he lives this other life, completely independent and without any thought of me and the kids. When he travels, he spends money going on side trips, expensive restaurants, hires motorcycles, goes to concerts and will even extend his trip so he can have few days to sight see if there are things he wants to do and see.
All I can do is raise the kids best I can and try to find a life of my own, too. It’s not the marriage I wanted. Not by a long shot, but it’s what happened.