Hey all. Throwaway account, etc. I posted this in AskReddit a few hours ago and a couple people suggested that I re-post it here. Forgive the length but this one's a doozy.

My wife and I have been together for 6 years and married for 5. We have a 4-year-old daughter together. I quit my job back in 2007 to cash out my 401K when we got pregnant to make ends meet while she was on bedrest. When our daughter was born and my wife recovered, she went back to work while I stayed home to play Mr. Mom. Since she has worked in the mortgage industry, making good money, and I was stuck in the lowly customer service biz when we got together, her earning potential was high enough to sustain us while I cared for our daughter at home.

I've been at home for almost 5 years now doting over the kiddo. It's had its ups and downs, but as my daughter is my only kid, I've worked hard to bring her up right. We've had a lot of fun together and have a really special bond. My bond with my wife is quite a bit shittier, however.

Her and I are both in our mid 30s. We've known each other since high school, both went our separate ways after graduation, and ended up running into each other online several years ago. At the time, we lived 1000 miles apart. We began a long distance relationship and, a few months later, I moved to be with her.

In hindsight, I should have seen the 100-foot-tall writing on the wall. When we began our relationship, she was in the middle of divorce proceedings with ex-husband #2, having blown through two marriages and three kids in the span of five years. But I was smitten and not thinking clearly, so I believed her when she said that her exes were just a couple of dicks and I believed her when she said that leaving all three kids with her two exes were for the good of the children (insurance purposes, etc.). Yeah, I know... I'm a dumbass.

Over the vast majority of our marriage, my wife has been controlling and manipulative. She became friends with my friends and then started drama to drive them away. Nearly all of my friends are gone, having taken the fuck off because of her. She has a major drinking problem and is a 'mean drunk'. I used to go out to the bar or the club with her before our daughter was born, but that stopped when I realized that every time we did, she would get verbally abusive, make fun of me, and treat me like shit.

I have no social life and not because of my position as stay-at-home dad. Whenever I am invited to go out by one of my few remaining friends, my wife will become cold and distant, asking a bunch of questions and trying to come up with excuses as to why I can't go out. I shit you not - a couple years ago, we had a week long argument because I wanted to go to the fucking book store to have some quiet time for an hour or two. She mocked me for liking to read and then gave me the cold shoulder for days. When I finally got sick of her shit and went to the book store the week after, she was texting me within 15 minutes and asking me when I was coming home. This was not an isolated incident.

She practically ignores our daughter, coming home from work and muttering "I work all day and have to put up with THIS???" when she comes home and our daughter is excited to see her. Nearly every day this is followed by her climbing into bed and half-sleeping all evening. About 10-15 minutes of this is devoted to her laying in bed with our daughter and taking a bunch of lovey-dovey pictures. I suspect her of doing this so that she will have photographic proof of being a supposedly loving mother when it comes time for the divorce. Her child with ex-husband #2 was premature and has special needs. When she tried to petition the court to grant her primary custody in 2008, the child's nurses testified against her, basically saying that she never did shit for him and basically ignored him whenever they were around. So this appears to be a pattern of hers - have a kid, get attention... when it comes time to do the hard stuff associated with kids, she bails.

She doesn't do shit around the house. I do ALL the chores, changed ALL the diapers, have made ALL the meals whether she is home or not. Her excuse is that she brings home the money and that's all she is obligated to do. She got a couple of cats and does fuck all for them. Doesn't change the litter box, doesn't feed them. So I've got a house, a daughter, and two cats to take care of, while the wife works and then comes home and does nothing.

She goes out 2-3 times a week to go drinking with friends without me. She's constantly at the bar, the club, concerts, you name it. We live in a major metropolitan area of about 2.5 million people and the number of times she's gone out, not told me where she's going, and not come back until the next morning number in the many dozens, if not hundreds. She has no interest in arranging for babysitters or ever spending any time with me. As such, I never leave the house, except to go on errands. When I ask her why she never wants to spend quality time with her husband, she gets angry and says that I don't like going out to clubs so it's best that I just stay home. I'm sure you know where I'm going with this...

A couple weeks ago, one of our cats woke me up by clawing the shit out of the underside of our mattress at 4 a.m. When I got up to get him out of our room, I tripped over the charging cord to my laptop and bent it. Attempts to repair it were unsuccessful and the laptop eventually died. We don't have the money to fix it right now so my wife said that I could use her laptop when she didn't need it. A week later, when I looked through her browser history while trying to find the site address of an article I had read a couple days previously, I stumbled upon her usage of a site called AshleyMadison.com.

This Ashley Madison site is evidently a quite popular dating site geared towards attached people finding other people to fuck behind their spouses'/partners' backs. My wife had not only checked it out, but had created a profile in November 2011 and has been actively soliciting sex and chatting with guys on and off ever since.

The next day, she was stupid enough to leave her Facebook and Hotmail accounts open and on separate tabs when she handed me the laptop one evening before going to bed. In those, I found messages between her and several guys, some beginning in 2010 and some in 2011, working on arrangements to fool around behind my back. In several of them, she went into great detail about her love of going down on dudes, favorite sexual positions, the whole nine yards. When asked about me, she dismissed me as "fat", "lazy", "mean", and that she "hated" me. She even told one of them that a "friend" had set her up with somebody who had become her "boyfriend" earlier in 2011, a relationship that had lasted for two months. Guess her "friend" doesn't care that she's married. So now I know that she's been cheating on me for at least a year. And she doesn't know that I know.

This is a girl who was fired from her job and accused of stealing $8000 from her employer a few years back. She swears she didn't do it, but her lawyer advised for her to plead guilty anyway to avoid jail time (guess he figured she didn't have a prayer in court).

This is a girl who, when ordered to create 100 scarves for the homeless as part of her community service, bullied me into doing nearly all of them because I wasn't "doing anything anyway" (except for, you know, raising our daughter).

This is a girl who has been on probation since 2008 and will be on probation until April 2013. One of her probation stipulations? Not drinking. She has broken this stipulation hundreds of times. If anyone so much as called her PO and said that they saw her out at the bar, her probation could be revoked and she could be sent to jail. She gives zero fucks, despite the risk to our family every time she goes out drinking (and sometimes driving afterwards).

This is a girl who enlisted in online schools and then told me that if I knew what was good for me, I'd do her homework for her because I had "nothing better to do". (I've finished 6 classes for her in their entirety - all A's and B's - and am still helping her.)

So obviously, on some of these nights out where she says she is going out with friends, she is instead meeting up with dudes to fuck. I checked our joint phone account records and she has hundreds of calls and texts to numbers that I am totally unfamiliar with. I'm sure that many of them are work related, just as I am sure that some of them are not. Between October and December 2011, around the time she started her Ashley Madison account, she had 147 calls for a total of nearly 600 minutes with a phone number that I don't know and that she would only call while at work, driving in her car, or out late at night. She just had a 106-text-long convo with a guy a couple days ago that I'm pretty sure she works with, which wouldn't be weird except that it started at 8 a.m. and lasted until 2 a.m. the next morning. Not really sure why she would be swapping work-related talk in the middle of the fucking night. The obvious answer is - she isn't.

I've fucking had it with this whore. I have been, and until this, was still very much in love with her. We hadn't had much of a sex life lately, which was probably due to me packing a few extra pounds, but I've been working on that. Of course, it's also probably due to her getting all the sex she needs elsewhere. When I write all this out, it's embarrassingly clear that she's been using me for what I can do for her and that it's up in the air as to whether she actually really loved me. She's a user and a manipulator and I'm done being shit on.

Anyhow, I'm divorcing her but I need to know how I should approach it. My parents live 4 hours away and have said they would let me move back in if we divorce (they never much liked her; guess they saw through her act when I couldn't.) They live in the same state and have said that they could come up one day that she's at work, pack up my shit, and take our daughter and I down to their house without my wife being the wiser.

Is this the route I should take or should I confront my wife with my evidence of her infidelity? I've been keeping a journal of sorts since 2010 with everything that my wife has done to me. It is currently 18 pages and 8900 words long. Figured it would be useful to have once I had finally had enough. My parents have a lawyer friend who advised that I take Natasha to my parents house. I can't legally keep her away from her mother, but if and when she came back to bring our daughter back to her house, I could serve her with divorce papers and make my parents' county the divorce jurisdiction. (?)

I have no money, no car, no job. I'm totally dependent on my wife and she knows it. Despite this, I'm confident that I would have a decent chance of getting primary custody because of my parents' support (wife's parents are MIA; family is full of whacked-out, drugged-out losers), my role as 'primary caregiver' throughout my daughter's life, and my wife's infidelity and all-around awfulness.

Please help, Reddit. I know that I've been a pussy and allowed myself to be mistreated for years. I guess I'm just afraid of being alone. I've let a lot of things slide to keep our family together. Instead of responding in kind, my bitch of a wife decided to use me, turn me into her maid and butler, and then fuck other guys once my back was turned. I'm heartbroken and devastated, but I'm also angry as hell. What should I do to make sure that my wife doesn't "win" this and raise my daughter (who I love with all my heart) as a man-hating clone of her worthless mother?????

tl;dr - Mr. Mom for several years who has done wife's schoolwork, community service, all the chores, all the housework, and all the parenting while the wife controls my every move, drove off nearly all of my friends, and is now fucking other guys behind my back. She doesn't know that I know. How do I approach the impending divorce to best insure that I crush this slut and keep our daughter with me?