A woman has shared the moment she read a "mean" text message her husband sent to his friends that ultimately cost them their marriage.
Writing for the parenting site Kidspot.com, the anonymous mom states: "I can define the moment when I knew I'd leave my husband.
"It wasn’t when he threw a glass of wine in my face while our baby was sitting in my lap. Or when he called me 'pathetic and lazy' when I begged him, crying, to please let me sleep in just one morning.
"It was at 9am on a Friday when he was standing in a towel in our bathroom."
The unnamed wife then recalls how her husband has been out the night before to celebrate a friend's birthday - opting to sleep in the family's spare room.
She had been "up since 5am with our two-year-old, as usual."
The mom then explains that - before even coming downstairs to say hello to his family (despite not seeing them since the morning of the day before) - he jumped in the shower.
Delving deeper into their relationship, the mom then explains that her husband refused to share his plans with her - "no discussion, no responsibilities. It was a major issue in our marriage since our son had been born."
She adds: "The man wouldn’t even agree to putting his events on a family calendar, let alone talk to me about what his plans were any night."
Whenever she did ask, she explained that him telling her his plans made it feel like he was "asking permission". To which she writes: "Idiot. It's called respect."
Despite the "millions of times [they] argued about his lack of communication", she admits that "nothing ever changed".
Then, as he was showering, the husband's phone started "pinging repeatedly".
She writes: "I wanted to see what was going on. By that stage, I suspected he’d been cheating on me. He was betraying me, but in an unexpected way."
However, rather than find a slew of messages from another lover, the mom instead opened her husband's group chat with some friends, in which they were discussing drinks that night.
"But my husband’s last reply left me cold," she wrote.
Messing his friends, the husband has typed: "Don’t think I can make it tonight. SWMBO will say no."
"What was 'SWMBO'? I assumed it was me, and I assumed it was mean. I wasn’t wrong," the mom writes.
After confronting her husband about the message as soon as he stepped out of the shower, he calmly told her that is stood for "She Who Must Be Obeyed".
"I’ll never forget that look of defiance on his face. No remorse. No apology. I felt like I'd been slapped across the face," she recalls.
Detailing the heartbreak of the message the mom writes:
"I put up with never knowing if he’d be home for dinner, never knowing if he’d be around for me to go out to have a haircut, or see my friends. I let him get away with it, because it involved too much arguing – it was easier to just ask my mom to help.
"It was easier to co-parent with my mom than it was with the father of my child."
After years of "countless arguments and abuse", the mom admits that she thought she deserved "a tiny bit of respect and loyalty when he’s talking about me publicly".
Reliving her embarrassment, the mom explains that his friends just replied with "lols" and laughing emojis - and she realized that "there was no coming back from that".
"Like a lightning bolt, I finally recognised this man did not deserve us. Why should we wait around for him, watching as he came and went, like the place was a hotel?"
Within a week, she explains that she had moved out with her son - "The son whom he lived with, but barely saw."
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