My husband and I carefully planned and prepared to have children ....
Will he resent me? Why won't he address his deep unhappiness? Am I stealing his dream? ...
NUF, you put a vast amount of data into your first posting. I'm going to take a slightly different tack than many of the respondents because there's some common ground between your context and my own:
1) I don't think there's anything seriously threatening to life, limb or the pursuit of happiness in your posting. You and DH already have your lives together far, far more than 99% of the people in this world and a good fraction of the people here on MMM.
2) You're going to get low quality relationship advice here. I don't mean to be disparaging to anyone, I'll say that about myself (and what I write next) also. None of us are pros so the psych feedback is all amateur.
3) Let your husband vent to you about his job because you are his partner, you are safe, and you've got his back. His bitching about his job does not constitute an emergency and does not mean you actually have to do anything but listen. In fact, what I advise you IS to listen, and if possible, do ACTIVE LISTENING where you reflect back to him, in your words, what he just said. The benefit of active listening is that it shows him you ARE listening and also forces him to "hear back his thoughts" in a different form. He'll automatically "hone" his own position if you do active listening.
4) Try, if you can, to gently and lovingly set limits on the bitching. What I mean by that isn't to "declare a limit and get his buy in". What I mean by that is after he winds down a little bit, change the subject and let him know you are changing the subject because you want him to be engaged with you and be with you in the moment. What this does is lets him know that he's received time with you, actively listening, and it's not put you in a bad mood nor has it jeopardized your relationship. It also lets him know that you still need and value his full participation after he's done venting.
5) Work with him to create a positive experience for both of you, be it cooking for dinner, having dinner, cleaning up after dinner, spending time with you and the baby, etc.
6) When you've been able to disengage his mind from work and engage him in a positive experience at home, call attention to the contrast and ask him how it feels. Get him to talk about how it feels for him to be in the moment but not wrapped up in work.
Your husband is afraid of the degree to which he needs his job, both for self-actualization as well as earnings. He's continually getting told he's not worthy at work and you can't underestimate the toxic, destructive power of what he's having to bear up under. He's to be congratulated that he can even see through his anger fog to build a stash and conceive of FIRE.
7) Don't concern yourself about whether or not he'll resent you for being a SAHM. If you have buy-in from him, take him at face value. One important message you've seen already is how your being at home can provide FIRE-like benefits, as you'll have more time to do highly leverageable things like preparing meals, keeping the house running, and even establishing a deeper and more meaningful relationship with your MIL.
8) You HAVE to get his ass on a bicycle somehow. That, or whatever physical activity trips his trigger. He bad needs both the health benefits and the distraction of physical activity. I have one brother who sounds like him, who ended up needing a triple heart bypass when he was in his early 40's.
Allow your husband's discovery and dealing with oppression NOT to be a house-on-fire emergency. Let it simply be his coping mechanism for a difficult job, but also help him limit his venting, help him realize that when he is venting, he's re-living an experience he doesn't like, and it's displacing important time with his family. "Extended bitching" has a cost, and it's a cost he truly doesn't want to pay, if he were able to slow down and truly see that.
One other thing: if you need to pry him away from this job and get him to look for employment elsewhere, you will need to get slightly involved. Tell me what you think about these ideas:
- see if you can identify competing law firms that would love to steal him away from his law firm, especially law firms that maybe have lost cases to his current employer
- identify the locations of those law firms to see if the commute to work will be better or worse. If better, you might be able to sell that as an aid to getting to that $2M stash sooner.
Most importantly NUF, you sound pretty damned awesome. You feel connection to your baby, your husband, your MIL and most importantly, yourself. You clearly know what you want to do with your time and what makes you happy. That's a miraculous thing, sis. Miraculous!
In a world full of people confused and not knowing what to do with their lives, you are genius for knowing yourself this well. In other words, your self-knowledge and joy at being with your child....isn't that something you want to bring to and impress on your child? Wouldn't it be equally awesome if you could instill your positive characteristics into your child by being SAHM?!?!
My wife did this with our two sons, who are now in their mid-late 20's. Let me tell you, it pays dividends every day. My wife made my boys into way, way better human beings than their old man is and I'm completely tickled about that.