I've got to agree with Margot62 here. The pot use is a red herring. The real trouble is the LW is married to a jerk who lies and who screams at her and their kid.

LW, ignore the pot for right now. Ask yourself if you want to continue to live with a man who doesn't respect you, who lies to you, and who can't have a disagreement without yelling. Ask yourself if you want your child to continue to grow up with a man who will blow up for relatively minor infractions like forgetting about a homework assignment.

If the answer is no, you have a choice. You can confront your husband, present your concerns, and try to get him into both individual and marriage counseling. If he won't, or if you don't want to go through the effort, then it might be time to leave.

I know, I know, you want to "keep the marriage together for the kid," but consider how the kid's doing now. He's the primary excuse for his parents to never have to be alone together, which means that he witnesses the tension and anger between the two of you, which will inevitably make him anxious and tense. He has a father who goes "ballistic" on him for forgetting homework, and who apparently accuses the kid of lying when all the kid did was forget. Does that sound like a healthy home life to you?

You know, I get this.

I was raised in a church, taught to believe that sex was dirty, shameful, and that only bad girls did that. Sexual desire, in women, was something to be ignored, denied, repressed, and stomped down. Because only dirty, dirty sluts want to have sex. From what I hear, the abstinence-only crap getting taught in many schools pretty much makes the same point.

And it isn't just churches that sell this idea. Sure, a guy can be called a slut, but the double standard of stud/slut is still alive and kicking. Women are typically judged very negatively if they have had "too many" sexual partners; if they behave in too sexually forward a manner; etc. Don't believe me? Follow the average rape trial, where a woman's behavior and previous number of sexual partners is typically brought up with the message that "she was asking for it."

Anyway, the point is this: When you live your entire life in a culture that says that sex is bad, that programming doesn't just go away when you're married, or go off to college, or decide that your high school boyfriend is The One. After years of trampling down and ignoring your desire for sex, it can be very difficult to get in touch with it again.

This happened a couple of summers ago in a town near mine. The poor woman didn't know that anything was wrong until she went to the daycare center to pick up her child.

The reactions were typical, a few empathetic ones with many, many more condemning the woman as a horrible, terrible person.

I think it's a self-defense mechanism--if you vilify the other person, make them as stark a contrast from yourself, then somehow you can believe that you would never make such a mistake.

Fortunately, the district attorney declined to prosecute her. The gist of his statements was that she had suffered, and would continue to suffer, enough without legal penalties for a tragic error.

Dear LW:

I understand. I've fallen into the abyss, where getting up in the morning takes more effort than running a mile; where eating seems like too much to bother with; where I question the sanity of anyone who seems to value me; where all I really want to do is curl up in a ball and never wake up again. I've fantasized about ending it, about just not existing tomorrow.

It's a dark and lonely place, isn't it? And I don't know that anyone who escapes it ever quite leaves the shadow of it behind. Getting out can seem like groping through a maze in the dark.

But it can be done. It's a long, hard slog, full of setbacks and moments of light, of the pull of depression versus the human desire to stop feeling pain. It's solitary, 'cuz even though loved ones can try to support you, all the hard work is yours alone.

I don't have any words of real wisdom to share with you. Just that, for now, hold your brother close to your heart. Live for him, at least for now. Take a small step today towards getting help. Practice saying to your mirror, "I need help." Practice until you can say it without your eyes welling up, until your throat no longer closes. Pick up the phone and call your doctor, or your brother, or a friend, or someone else you can utter those words to. And then, let them help.

And to some of the posters: Your sharing of your experiences and your words of support to this LW have left me in tears.