If you can hold out for another 18 months, it'll get much better.

In the meantime, if your means allow it, nannies and au pairs can be a huge help. I'd even advise you to hire a full-timer. (You might even want to consider moving to a country where this is cheaper and more easily possible.) There ought to be no shame in it.

There are ways to throw money at the stress you are feeling, which will still be cheaper than divorce. Children can get much easier as they mature, which might give you space to work through your marriage even if it feels impossible now.

I was deeply burned out at the 14 mark with my first child. I did lots of things since then and am much better even after more children.

Yes, I also found the first child much harder than the second, which I wasn’t expecting.

I’m one of those people who had a strong feeling of falling in love with my child right away, but even so the toil and sleep deprivation ground my sanity down to a low I never reached before or since.

I was really anxious about #2, but a) we spent some savings and hired much more help for the first year, and b) she just sleeps better than her older brother, which is luck. It’s been incomparably better.

To the parent poster, look into a mother’s helper, or even a cleaner who can come daily. We also had to switch to formula earlier than we planned (biology intervened), and that transition had to happen even earlier with #2, and frankly that helped too. I’ve become very pro-formula. Nursing is nice when it’s working, but if it’s not, it’s not worth making a tough year harder—formula has gotten quite good and lets you balance the load better. The breastmilk-IQ link everyone’s scared of isn’t borne out by sibling studies anyway.

I don’t know your situation but for me everything changed once my child could speak and started going to preschool (so I got a break). The fall-in-love-with-child phenomenon didn’t happen to me until my child was around 3-1/2