Is my husband abusive? or is he right?

[tizlit]

Sorry to read about your situation - I DID read (managed just about) your entire epos.
Facts are :
- your husband is not an idiot, but a manipulative control freak beast.
- he has no respect for you or for your child
- you said yourself that he does not love you, what sort of basis is that for a marriage (to last...)?
- if you stay with him, he will bring more problems to the existing ones, with a result your child will suffer.

Your priorities should lie with the well-being of your child, first and foremost. You cannot force someone to love you.
Get rid of him, and fast. Contact a legal advisor, lawyer, and start divorce proceedings. There is a way.

[airlineguy1980]

wow this story really drawn my attention.to be frank.your husband need to know whats the meaning of mother tongue.your child will speak your language no matter what and it should speak.you dont need to agree to this before during dating or before child is born.its natural.i have seen my friends family and made this decision.he is malaysian and speak english to his children and wife korean speak korean to them.the child handles perfectly normal when look at mother it speaks in korean to guest and dad speaks in english
in your case i dont understand why ur husband worry so much on the english part of your child.after all its just langauge.why do he feel inferior and try to erase the identity ur child carries.he have other issues.ur marriage is already over.not becoz u have this argument.no one will bring this language issue to an extent of chasing a wife out of their life.

[AldenG]

Apart from being a controlling asshat, it sounds like your husband is ashamed for some reason to speak such a small language from such a small country. Basically he'd like to forget he's a Finn. And what people dislike in themselves, they tend to despise in their children and others close to them. He sounds like a crappy husband and a crappier father.

[RobF]

To my husband, learning languages is a waste of time, once you know English you are set to live in the world. He also thinks it is a waste of your brain resources, that could be well put to other uses, like becoming a better scientist, a better mathematician, anything. So he thinks I am setting our son to be a loser who can maybe translate and read from various languages, but won´t be able to do anything original on his own. That to learn about the world, to learn to read and write and build on that all you need is one language and since English was what we spoke all these years, it is the logical choice.

... unless you work in France. Or South America. Or Africa. Or Asia.

Apart from being a controlling asshat, it sounds like your husband is ashamed for some reason to speak such a small language from such a small country. Basically he'd like to forget he's a Finn. And what people dislike in themselves, they tend to despise in their children and others close to them. He sounds like a crappy husband and a crappier father.

Ditto. No child deserves a father like that.
And things like this can only lead from bad to worse.

Best of luck.

Just as an aside; not meant to panic you and I'm assuming this is not happening to you, but:
Reading your story more and more reminded me of a show that was recently on Dutch telly; some kids were kidnapped by their own fathers to the father's native country (Egypt, Turkey, Morocco, mainly) as Holland was deemed "wrong" for the child. Moms got "visitation rights" (an hour every three weeks) but were not allowed to speak their native language.
The only way to get your child back, was to kidnap them yourselves.

Some dads ...

[hl_82]

Ditto to pretty much everything posted here.

In a world like the one we live in, knowing more than one language, or even more than two = beneficial. He's simply making life somewhat harder for not only you, but your child and child's future. Even though your language would be spoken by a smaller group of people, it would still be a pro, not a con.

In short: he's wrong.