‘You Should Be Kissing My Feet!’ My Husband Screamed at Me One Night – Three Days Later, Karma Called

Let me tell you about the moment I realized fairy tales don’t age well in real life.

I was 23 when I first met Rick, and I genuinely thought I’d won the romantic lottery. You know that feeling, right? When someone walks into your world and suddenly everything feels possible?

Rick had a confident, take-charge smile and a laugh that made people lean in. He opened doors without a second thought and memorized my coffee order down to the oat milk.

He once told me, “Someday, I’m going to build you a house with a porch swing and a killer sunset.”

God, I believed every word.

“You’re amazing,” he’d say, spinning me around in his tiny apartment kitchen. “I can’t believe you’re real.”

I’d laugh, dizzy from the spinning and the compliments. “Stop it. You’re being ridiculous.”

“No, I’m being honest. Being with you has changed my whole life. For the better. I can’t imagine living without you.”

We married two years later, and for a while, it was good. Messy, noisy, real, but good.

We had a son, then a daughter. We bought a modest house with peeling shutters but decent bones.

But somewhere between teething and kindergarten tuition, Rick started sighing louder, listening less, and helping… never.

The compliments turned into observations, then corrections, and finally, complaints.

This year, our son is 7, our daughter is 5, and the only time Rick and I talk is when he’s complaining about something.

He grumbles about how I load the dishwasher and sucks his teeth when dinner isn’t piping hot. He once asked me if I was “ever going to wear real jeans again.”

Can you believe that?

It was bad enough that he wanted to micromanage the angle of every plate in the dishwasher, but criticizing my clothes? As if my comfy “busy mom working from home” stretch denim wasn’t real enough for his refined tastes.

So when he stormed into the bedroom one night, waving a shirt like a flag of war, I wasn’t shocked, just tired… bone-deep, soul-crushing tired.

“What is this?!” he barked, shaking a wrinkled dress shirt in my face like evidence in a murder trial.

I barely looked up from my laptop, where I was reviewing contracts for a client deadline. “It’s 9 p.m., Rick. There are clean, ironed shirts in the closet.”

“Where? This one?” He yanked out a light-blue one, practically vibrating with rage.

“I asked for that one! The navy one! Are you kidding me right now? And dinner? Overcooked meat with mushy rice. What exactly do you do all day?”

That’s when something inside me snapped. Not the explosive kind of snap, but a quieter, potentially more dangerous kind.

“Rick, I’m working. Order takeout if it’s that bad.”

His face turned purple.

“Unbelievable!” he shouted, flinging the shirt onto the bed. “I bust my ass to support this family, and you can’t handle the basics? You should be kissing my feet for everything I do! Think about it: who would want a divorcée with baggage, anyway?”

Then he grabbed his keys and slammed the door like a hormonal teenager having a tantrum.

And I just sat there.

Instead of crying or yelling after him, I just stared at the blinking cursor on my screen. In the silence, a single, clear realization washed over me: I was done.

Not the we’re-having-a-fight kind of done. Not even the maybe-I’ll-go-to-my-mom’s kind of done, but the nothing-left-to-give, end-of-the-road kind.

And with it came a sense of relief so profound I’m not sure I can put it into words. It was like I’d been buckling under crushing pressure, but then suddenly, the weight was gone.

I went to bed and slept like a baby.

Rick still hadn’t come home when I woke the following day, so I spent the morning rehearsing what I’d say when he finally returned.

By the time I got home from dropping the kids at school, I’d settled on this: “Either we start therapy this week, or we’re done.”

Simple. Clean. Final.

I practiced that line like a monologue for the world’s worst play. I had the speech locked and loaded, ready to fire the second he walked through the door.

But Rick didn’t come home that night, or the next. Three days in, I started to think he’d decided for both of us.

Then my phone rang.

“You have to come now,” his mother said, her voice shaky. “Rick’s in the hospital.”

I felt a wave of emotion too complicated to define.

I grabbed my purse and drove to Saint Mary’s like my life depended on it.

I walked into a sterile room and saw Rick lying there like a battered saint, face bruised but oddly peaceful. For a split second, I almost forgot why I was so angry.

“Hey,” he murmured, reaching for my hand with those puppy-dog eyes that used to melt me. “You came. I knew you would.”

After three days of silence, that sugar-sweet tone raised my hackles.

“How’s your head?” I asked, guarded but civil.

“Just a mild concussion. Doctor says I’ll be fine.” He smiled that old smile. “I was scared you wouldn’t show up.”

“What happened to the car?”

And that’s when the lies started.

“Oh, I wasn’t driving. I was in a cab,” he said quickly, too quickly. “Crazy cab driver. Probably shouldn’t have been on the road.”

He tried to shift the conversation to the kids, asking about their soccer games and piano lessons, but a knock at the door silenced him mid-sentence.

Two police officers entered, and the room suddenly felt smaller.

“Sir,” one officer said. “We need to ask a few more questions about the vehicle you were in.”

The color drained from Rick’s face faster than water down a drain.

Turned out, Rick wasn’t in a cab. The driver was a woman named Samantha, who was currently under investigation for identity theft and wire fraud. Apparently, Rick met her through work.

But that wasn’t even the worst part.

The cops started asking questions about Rick’s relationship with Samantha, and his face turned as pale as the bedsheets.

He denied any romantic involvement at first, but they calmly reminded him that lying to law enforcement could carry legal consequences.

That’s when they pulled out the evidence.

The cops had texts, GPS data, and security camera footage of Rick and Samantha going back a year.

A year!

While I was home, loading the dishwasher wrong and overcooking his precious dinners, he’d been dining at fancy restaurants and rumpling sheets in luxury hotels with a suspected criminal.

I stood there, staring as the man who screamed about shirts and rice started sobbing like a child caught stealing cookies from the jar.

“I messed up, okay?!” he begged, reaching for my hand. “But you can’t leave me. Not now, not like this. I need you. The kids need their dad.”

I had thought I knew the perfect thing to say when I saw Rick again, but now, I looked him dead in the eye and threw that script out the window.

I walked out of that hospital room and didn’t look back. I spent the weekend gathering evidence and filed for divorce on Monday.

My phone blew up.

The voicemails started first, then came the texts and emails.

I even got a call from his mom, who gave me the “he’s a broken man” guilt trip, as if his brokenness was somehow my responsibility to fix.

“He made a mistake,” she pleaded over the phone. “People make mistakes. You have children together. Don’t make a selfish choice.”

“You should’ve said that to Rick when he first started acting like the boss I never asked for instead of a husband,” I replied. “Or a year ago, when he started his affair with that criminal.”

“He didn’t know—”

“It doesn’t matter,” I replied, and hung up.

It didn’t stop there. Rick sent flowers and texted photos of us and the kids, but he failed to consider one thing.

You can’t guilt-trip someone who has nothing to feel guilty about.

Now it’s just me and the kids, and you know what? The house feels calmer, safer. Dinner isn’t perfect, but no one’s throwing shirts over it. Sometimes, we even eat cereal for dinner, and nobody dies.

My daughter helps set the table, and my son tells me jokes while we fold laundry.

I’ve realized the “baggage” in our house wasn’t me, or the kids, or the mess of daily life. It was Rick, the man who screamed about respect but never learned how to show any.

Here’s another story: When my husband begged me to take out a $15K loan for his mother, he claimed she’d pay it back in a month. But weeks later, my MIL denied ever borrowing a dime. Now the debt is mine, and the lies are only just beginning to unravel.