Dear Prudence: My Wife Is Reneging on Our Agreement About Having Kids.

[minoanmiss]

How much say does a husband actually have in family planning? My wife and I have two incredible and healthy children, but I am facing a blockade when it comes to the conversation about having a third. When I was young, I had my closest sibling die tragically. Ever since, I have always wanted a large family and have maintained from the beginning of our relationship that I could never be comfortable or happy with less than three children because of the lived fear in me of what happens if one dies and all our eggs are in one basket or our child loses their only sibling. I know it’s “primitive” thinking, but it is hard to deny the possibility when it happens to you.

So far, I have deferred completely to my wife in terms of timing and family planning. After our second was born, she informed me that it was too much anxiety to consider another child and placed an “embargo” on even discussing the possibility until she “felt ready.” Two years have passed now, and after trying to broach the conversation, I was told, essentially, that the embargo is still in place. I have worked tirelessly to make motherhood as small a burden as possible for my wife. I do vastly all of the child care, meals, bedtime baths, etc. She is very career-focused, and that plays a part in her general anxiety levels and why I carry the load of being the “primary” parent, and while I too have a career, I have never aspired to much more than being comfortable and being a good father/husband.

After our last abbreviated conversation, I told her I suspected that her plan was to freeze me out and wait out the clock, and I can only view that as a betrayal. But outside of the unlikely case that I pack my bags, am I just a passenger on wherever this ship is going?

A: You have every right to be frustrated with your wife for opting to wait out the clock instead of communicating with you.

But the person who has to carry the baby always gets to win if they don’t want another baby. And if one parent doesn’t want another baby, the other one should take that very, very seriously.

Sadly you come out on the “you don’t really get a say” side of these two rules that I just made up (but that feel logical and fair to me). So yes, you’re kind of just a passenger on this ship.

That doesn’t mean you have to be a miserable passenger who is terrified that one of his children will die. I really hope you will get some help to stop your awful childhood loss from interfering with your adult life. My biggest concern is that your kids are going to grow up fast, and I don’t want your fears about death and fixation on a third child to cause you to miss out on enjoying every minute of your time with the family you clearly love.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Dude! It is not fair of you to offload your grief and trauma about losing a sibling on your wife's uterus!

[minoanmiss]

HONESTLY. Heir-and-two-spares is not a reason to bring people into the world let alone to force pregnancy on someone. I really hope someone this guy will listen to (not his poor wife) reads his letter and says in a way he will listen to, "do you know what a fucked up idea that is? We need to get you some treatment."

[sathari]

Heir-and-two-spares is not a reason to bring people into the world let alone to force pregnancy on someone.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

[rmc28]

Without getting into the childhood tragedy aspect, my spouse and I talked about having a large family before we even started trying for the first baby. However, we have two children, and there will be no more. The first pregnancy was hard and the second was awful and I did not - do not - have the courage in me to go through a third one. It's not about my career or the childcare, it's just the reality of pregnancy in the body that I have. If LW's wife feels similarly about her pregnancies there is no amount of childcare and housework, or indeed of guilt-tripping about a broken bargain, that can change her mind.

[minoanmiss]

Yes, exactly! AS you know, rmc28-Bob, pregnancy is really huge and can be excruciating and even deadly. I am horrified by people who want to force others to undergo it.

If LW's wife feels similarly about her pregnancies there is no amount of childcare and housework, or indeed of guilt-tripping about a broken bargain, that can change her mind. And needless to say absolutely none should be applied!

I'm trying not to let myself rant about this one but I am so utterly shocked at how unsympathetic the LW is to the bodily experience of pregnancy and how massively it can affect the person being pregnant. If his wife can't deal with doing that again I cannot fathom why, if he loves her even as much as I loved my pet fish, he wants to make her do so.

(Plus his 'reason' is a pernicious trauma scar he should be in therapy for, sheesh. But that's another discussion.)

Hug your kids for me. :) I, for one, think you have done well by the world.

[conuly]

(Plus his 'reason' is a pernicious trauma scar he should be in therapy for, sheesh. But that's another discussion.)

Yeah. Right now, judging from this letter, it's primarily hurting his relationship with his wife. Which is bad enough - but do we know it's not hurting his kids too?

[minoanmiss]

I can't see how being thought of as "not enough" can do anything but hurt them -- people pick up on each others' emotions, especially children their parents'.

[laurajv]

Yep. I love my younger kid but if someone had told me what that pregnancy would do to me, I wouldn't've done it. My one brother & his wife wanted more, but she nearly died with their youngest. One of my sisters has been told if she has another child, she will probably never walk again, due to progressive damage to her pelvis.

People who bear children have a whooole lot more riding on the line than whether or not another baby arrives.

[gingicat]

At about the midpoint of my second pregnancy, I announced that I would be getting my tubes tied as early as possible. There was no spousal disagreement, because it was clearly a Very Good Idea.

[conuly]

LW needs therapy. It is entirely possible that, in addition, LW and his wife would benefit from couples therapy, but that's a separate issue.

When it comes to children, it's a two yes situation. You can't compromise and only have half a child. So if one partner wants a child and the other doesn't - especially if the other is the one with the uterus! - then that's that.

[cereta]

Okay, everything everyone else said, but...as the mother of a (hard-won) singleton, I have actually had people ask me some variation on "what if something happens to her," like having another child will somehow make it better if we lose her. You hear this shit all the time in fertility discussions, whether about trying to have more children through fertility science when the first was so hard, or worse, opting to become irreversibly infertile. Seriously, people genuinely seem to view it like getting a kitten after a beloved cat dies, which okay, yes, good for cats, not good for human beings.

And the worst of all of this is that parents who are so focused on having more kids spend emotional coinage that could be spent nurturing and enjoying the kids they have. At best, that's sad for the parent. At worst, you have to wonder if the existing kid(s) ever pick up the vibe that they're somehow not enough.

[conuly]

Seriously, people genuinely seem to view it like getting a kitten after a beloved cat dies, which okay, yes, good for cats, not good for human beings.

If you know somebody whose pet has died it is a huge faux pas to suggest they just replace the pet with a new kitten or puppy. They will adopt a new pet when/if they're ready, and not before.

In fact, I was just at the vet last night (24 hour vet, apparently they make appointments all day long, not just emergency visits!) and had to listen to some poor woman deciding to put down her cat concluding that she just didn't want another one if it hurts this much. She might change her mind in the future, or she might not, but she's not going to appreciate other people telling her that's the solution to her grief, because it's not.

[cereta]

Yeah, I know. My in-laws are those people. And a new animal doesn't erase or replace the old one. I'll always miss my first girl, and the little guy we lost two years ago. But it is common enough for people to adopt new pets when one dies that the analogy holds.

[lavendertook]

The analogy may hold, but it is still insensitive to people who don’t consider adopting a new cat a replacement for a cat of their household who died, or as central to their emotional life as a human child is for those who have them, which I think is the point of what conuly was making. We exist. I find it so and feel disrespected and dismissed by this analogy--please stop using it.

[mirlacca]

Oh, this. I had to put my dog down, and my parents could not understand why I grieved. My mother tried to send me next door to see our neighbor's new puppies. When I realized why I was sent over there, I came back and told my mom, "Don't you EVER do that to me again." She never did get it.

As for this, I'm surprised that no one has suggested adoption (at least not so far). I agree, the one with the uterus gets to decide how it gets used, but does the wife just not want to bear another child, or does she not want to have another child at all? It's not clear.

[xenacryst]

SING IT SISTER!

[ysobel]

LW needs therapy.

What if they have a third kid and then two die in an accident? Better have a fourth! ...oh wait...

[ysobel]

...also the wife hasn't reneged! it's not like they had a "I'll take the trash out for a year in exchange for you carrying our third baby"!

(even if they did have that, the wife's allowed to change her mind -- pregnancy is huge, and babies are definitely all-in.)

he's acting like she agreed to sell him her PlayStation and so he said no to other PS offers and then she said "oh never mind" and now he doesn't have a PS and is grumpy about it.

[cimorene]

This, exactly. The mention of him being the 'primary caretaker' for the kids really rubbed me the wrong way because of exactly that, the implications that it's simply transactional, which is seriously disturbing as an approach to agreement with your partner, LET ALONE something to do with having children!

I'm also side-eyeing the claim, because, like... there are stay-at-home dads and great dads and primary caretakers and my dad even DID a majority of dishes and cleaning and stuff... and yet statistically the primary time burden of household tasks falls to women and it strikes me as more likely that a guy (especially a guy this self-centered and entitled) thinks that when actually his wife spends more time and effort on it than that a guy actually does most of it.

[conuly]

Have you ever noticed that every single time there's an article about the parenting gap or the chore gap or the parenting AND chore gap the comments are filled with self-righteous men declaring that THEIR family doesn't work that way or ANY family they know... but there's never even one woman making the same claim?

I always respond to them asking why their wife isn't commenting if the division of labor in their home is so equal, but I don't intend to dignify their replies by quoting them.

[beable]

I do have a pair of friends for which it is absolutely true, but the dad isn’t in the parenting blogs claiming his family is different because a) he’s too busy being the primary caregiver and more seriously because b) he has enough social justice sensibilities not to derail comment threats with “but I’m a special exception give me cookies” type of comments.

I have another pair of friends where the dad probably thinks they are coparenting but his wife would say differently - he may take charge of lots of the tasks like post-meal kitchen cleanup or daily parenting tasks, etc but she’s still absolutely managing the mental load of the stuff like kid schedules and school permission slips etc

[conuly]

Oh, these commenters don't claim that their families are different. That'd be bad enough. No, they claim that their families are normal and that there IS no gap.

[firecat]

Right, I really would like to know his wife's take on "I have worked tirelessly to make motherhood as small a burden as possible for my wife. I do vastly all of the child care."

[conuly]

Maybe she'll tell us if she stops laughing.

[sathari]

Agree completely with everyone else's takes on this, and I would like to add that LW's take on sibling relationships reminds me a little of a line from Mirror Dance in the Vorkosigan Saga, wherein Cordelia says that her son Miles, being an only child, has rather unrealistically rosy ideas about sibling relationships*--- and I think LW's reaction is along the lines of "hold my beer" about idealization of sibling relationships, in that he lost a sibling at an early age and so not only has that grief and trauma to deal with (or, apparently, at least partly fail to deal with) but has also possibly built up an idea of how close and supportive that relationship would have been if his sibling had lived. Which in no way guarantees that LW's children will be as close as he imagines he and his sibling would have remained as older children, then adolescents, then adults, and also, regardless of the number of children LW has, has the potential for LW to put expectations for closeness between/among his children that are not realistic for the children he actually has. (Admittedly, my go-to response for a lot of parenting questions is "Parent the kid[s] you have, not the one[s] you wish you had.")

Also, have LW and wife discussed adoption? Or, failing that, forming closer relationships with extended family/neighbors/family of choice with kids of a similar age? Because all of those are options for promoting long-terms friendships among young people that don't involve LW's wife being pregnant again. (Not that I think LW's approach to his childhood trauma is a healthy one, but these are at least some options that move the conversation between him and his wife out of the "either/or" rut that they're currently in, and might help LW get at some of his own issues around that childhood trauma and grief.)

*Disclaimer: I'm an only child, and I never once had any rosy warm fuzzy notions about what having a sibling would have been like for me, so there's that.

[minoanmiss]

*only child fistbump*

I wanted a sibling so my parents would have someone else to focus some of their attention on. I don't think I ever actually thought about my interactions with that mythical person, for good or for ill.

[jadelennox]

100% to all of you, and also, look, never have a kid you don't both want, okay? The kid is going to be their own person and they don't need to grow up with resentment, and besides, the likelihood of that poisoning the marriage is high. This goes for parents of any gender.

[julian]

The thing here is, yes, trauma response and it's unreasonable and also forced pregnancy is bad, and also also, the current kids do notice when Life Is Stressful.

But I do think that if they had an agreement of some kind, then that *is* a problem, in a more abstract ethical kind of way. It doesn't supercede the fact that it's her body and her choice, but it's relevant to their lives.

He *could* see if she'd be interested in couples' therapy, *which* would hopefully be useful in ramming it into his head that he can't be the only one making the decisions around there, in addition to possibly being useful for communication in general.

If she doesn't want to, then he should totally go to therapy on his own, though. Because oy.

[lavendertook]

LW’s wife has a right to change her mind on child bearing at any time. It’s not a betrayal to change your mind, and he needs to get off that idea. If he wants another child, then they need to talk about alternate means for him, adoption, or fostering and whether she is willing to live with more children.

But it sounds like he’s likely badgering her and learning to respect her reasons and wants is something he is going to need to work on first with help from that therapist who is going to help him stop thinking of children as replaceable items and what other plans he has for them to fulfill his needs.

[torachan]

In addition to what everyone else has said...we're still in the middle of a global pandemic!

[melannen]

Yeah, my reaction to this letter was, hey LW, *everybody* is super anxious right now, maybe she's just trying to wait out the world currently burning down, not her biological clock!!

(And if you can't communicate well enough to figure out which it is, maybe don't have more kids anyway.)