Can I take my child with me when I leave my husband?

My husband and I have been unhappy pretty much since we got married. We got married when I was 6 months pregnant with an unplanned pregnancy, we were engaged when I fell pregnant and the wedding was moved forward. When I fell pregnant and was a couple of months into the pregnancy, it was like my husband-to-be completely changed. I'd already moved to his home village to be where he wanted to live, isolated from my family and friends...and his village is incredibly rural, it's 3 hours to the nearest city and you can be completely snowed in in the winter. His family are incredibly close-knit and very much village folk, his mother made it perfectly clear while I was pregnant that she felt that we shouldn't be having the baby, she told me that I wasn't what she wanted for her son, she actually questioned whether I actually loved her son even though I had relocated hundreds of miles, giving up a really good job opportunity to be with him. The pregnancy came at the worst possible time for his mother, his 30 year old sister had just left home and she was suffering from empty nest syndrome and latching onto my husband, ringing upwards of 5 or 6 times a night. My husband was ditching me while pregnant to attend to her. She kept criticising me in front of him and he'd never once intervene to tell her to stop and indeed would berate me if I chose to walk out rather than listen to it. Obviously this was very hard for me, being a sensitive pregnant lady isolated and alone and it caused real problems between me and my husband to be.

My father gave me a  sum of money to put the wedding forward, which was enough to get married abroad or wedding at registry office plus cheap honeymoon, not a proper traditional wedding. I didn't want the attention anyway and my family is quite complicated with divorces etc, so it wouldn't have been appropriate to have everyone at a big party and that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to get married abroad and my fiance was quite happy about this until his mother put her foot down and kicked up a massive stink saying she wouldn't pay the money to come. I ended up being beaten down with the wedding being at our local registry office and even then my MIL spent the entire run up and the wedding complaining about how she wasn't allowed to invite half the village, why we wouldn't have a reception etc etc, but she didn't put her hand in her pocket once to even pay for the traditional grooms stuff. I mention this because this really has had a massive knock on effect on the start of our marriage because I actually couldn't get over the fact that I was sidelined even at my own wedding and my husband didn't even speak to his mother when she was ******** me off to my own family at the wedding itself.

When we came back from the honeymoon his mother continued to get worse and worse. To the point where it descended into an argument where she started swearing at me in front of my husband, he just stood there and did nothing and I had to ask her to compose herself like a reasonable adult and if she wouldn't I was leaving, just like she wanted. I ended up walking out, she faked a panic attack and I announced to my husband that me and his unborn child were getting the bus to go to my mothers....and he chose to stay and make sure his mother was alright, rather than his 7 month pregnant wife. After that, his sisters got in on the act as well and started on me as well, at that point I announced to my husband that I was relocating back to where I was from and he could either come with me or accept our marriage was over before it had begun. To give him his dues, he moved with me and seemed to be trying to make our marriage work at this point, he started college and started retraining but once he'd qualified, he sunk into a depression after I'd had our daughter and didn't really bother trying to get work.

I went back to work when our daughter was 7 months old, I didn't want to and felt really guilty about it, but I'm higher qualified than my husband and at that point had a really good work history, I got a new job with prospects and training. One of us had to work. My husband was supposed to work part-time (he's self-employed) and look after our daughter part-time, but he was struggling to deal with her and keep the house clean, so he kept sticking her into childcare which didn't help with the mum guilt. My daughter at the time had an undiagnosed allergy that we were fighting to get diagnosed at the time and was screaming and not sleeping almost 24 hours a day, so life literally felt like hell, working long hours but still being poor, coming home to a still dirty house, the guilt over parenting, literally coping on maybe 2 hours a night sleep. When my husband got offered a reasonably well paid job back in his hometown in the family business, he was literally on the verge of a breakdown and I moved back with him to try and keep our marriage going.

I stayed at home with my daughter and things seemed to be getting better but then we ran into some financial difficulties and we were then offered the opportunity to live rent free in a property my MIL owned temporarily to sort ourselves out. This property was in the village my MIL lives in. I didn't want to move but my husband said we had no choice and it would be a temporary situation for a few months until we got ourselves back on our feet again. It's been over a year now, we are still here and my husband announced to me during an argument lately that we are staying here, he's not moving from here for another few years at least and that he's never going to change how he is so I'm going to have to accept him how he is or leave him. But things have changed a lot in that year. I decided to go back to University to retrain as a nurse, there is currently no decent bus service to this village and even with my husband driving me to the nearest train station it's a 2 1/2 hour commute to Uni and an hours commute to my placements. My husbands father died suddenly a couple of months ago and that's had serious repurcussions on our lives - my MIL in her grief has become really openly nasty towards me though my husband refuses to see it, down to making up lies, saying I've said things about my husband that I haven't and blaming me for my husband heading towards a nervous breakdown, saying that I'm putting the stress on him. My husband has taken over the family business, but won't let me help or have access to the business accounts where all his wages now go into, his mother has been given access though, so she knows more about the finances than me. It really bothered my husband that I got a bursary and he's been pretending we've got no money and making me go without uni books etc so I can pay to put food on the table. My husband, partly due to grief and stress, has started acting really obnoxious and derogatory towards me, he was a little bit like that before but it's like I'm his emotional punching bag now, I counted 18 seperate occasions today where he said something derogatory or inflammatory about me. When we've had arguments, he's refused to drive me to my transport to get to placement. He refuses to move to the next town along so I can be more independent and our daughter can go to a better school.

I just feel so downtrodden and down and I'm really scared to leave him. I love him but I don't think I'm in love with him anymore, I think he's killed that for me. I don't think I'll ever win in the battle vs his mother and sisters and I can't live here the rest of my life with all the same problems like groundhog day. I've suggested leaving him before and his responses have ranged from sucidal to saying he won't let me leave or get a new partner (believe me that really isn't one of the reasons I want to leave him, I just want a stable life to work hard and raise my daughter without anyone interfering too much) to the one I'm most scared of - saying that he will make it so the courts prevent me and my daughter from leaving the county, that I won't end up with custody of her.

I'm scared he might be right because I don't have the job he has, I'm a full-time student and I've heard being a working mother on next to no money can go against you. I couldn't cope living here, there's no transport for me to carry on my course and next to no job prospects. One of my parents has offered for me and my daughter to move in with them if I can transfer my course to their nearest university, that they will help me with providing a home and helping me raise her until I've graduated and got a job, but they live 2 and a half hours away from where I am now. It's a good area but it's not where my daughter has grown up, I'd be uprooting her from her admittedly not so great nursery, her home village and half of the family that she's grown up with in favour of my support network and my family. While my husband would continue to live in our marital home and stay in the same place...I think this is where he thinks he has it over me and uses it against me so I won't leave.

I'm scared of telling him I want to leave with her and doing it amicably because I know it wont be amicable. He'll threaten and I'm scared he will actually physically stop me from taking our daughter with me. Also, I'm really scared of his mum and sisters, they are not as mild mannered as my husband is, they can be aggressive. And I can't go without my daughter, up until 5 months ago I was her main caregiver. I really do not want her raised here with these people. I'm so tempted and are being encouraged by some members of my family to just pack up and leave with her and contact him once I'm in a safe place 2 hours away, but I'm worried if I do that it'll go against me regarding custody. Please help me, I need to know my rights and how to actually physically leave. I need to add as well that I struggle making phone calls because he has access to and looks at all the phone bills online and I also live really far away from any advice organisations. I also need to know if people think I should leave, am I being selfish? I feel selfish for even thinking this when he's grieving, I feel guilty that I'm going to uproot my daughters life and ruin my husbands just because I can't be happy with the situation. He's not a bad man and he is a good dad, just a useless husband, even though I know he tries in his own way.

Can I take my children when I leave my husband?

How do you leave someone you live with and have a kid with?

Can my wife leave and take my child UK?