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Dear Prudence: I thought my wife accepted our decision not to have a baby
Turns out maybe not.
Dear Prudence,
My wife and I both had kids rather young so when we met, they were well into middle school. I got the snip right after my daughter was born and was upfront about not wanting more children. My wife was OK with this until around our second year of marriage. Then she became obsessed with having a baby that was “ours.”
It nearly broke our marriage. I thought we had hit the lottery because our kids all got along and we had a successful blended family. I basically told my wife she had to choose what kind of life she wanted: what we had versus what she dreamed up. We went to therapy and we worked through it—or so I thought.
We recently went through a crisis where one of our kids had an unplanned pregnancy and they chose to end it. We are lucky to live in a blue state but the situation was fraught. My wife’s reaction blindsided me. She was so angry and felt she had been “cheated again” because we would’ve raised the baby if they kept it. Luckily, she didn’t say this around our kids, but her reaction makes me think our marriage is not salvageable. She told me she regrets not pushing for another child and that I forced her to give up her dream. She didn’t want to be a single mom again. She later apologized but is the damage done? We are both pushing 50 and I thought we were happy. Is counseling even possible at this point? I feel like I am living with a stranger ever since she confessed.
—No Baby
Dear No Baby,
Sure, your wife may have been dishonest with you about her enduring desire to have kids—despite working through this years ago—but it’s also possible that the ordeal with the abortion triggered her former desires in a way that surprised everyone, including herself. Just because she’s made peace with your shared decision to not have a baby doesn’t mean that she can’t still mourn a version of a life that she once wanted.
I don’t think there’s an easy way to tell at this point which scenario applies here. I think it would be a good idea to revisit counseling, since that seemed helpful in giving you both some additional support when you were making the decision to not have a child the first time around. Your wife might simply need a space where her feelings of regret and grief feel validated, and you both might find it helpful to “review,” so to speak, the original decision and how its impacted your lives. I’m not suggesting you both revisit the decision itself, but just because it was made years ago doesn’t mean you can’t still talk about how it’s affected both of you. In fact, it’s probably healthier to look back at something so big with the perspective you’ve gained since.
Dear Prudence,
My wife and I both had kids rather young so when we met, they were well into middle school. I got the snip right after my daughter was born and was upfront about not wanting more children. My wife was OK with this until around our second year of marriage. Then she became obsessed with having a baby that was “ours.”
It nearly broke our marriage. I thought we had hit the lottery because our kids all got along and we had a successful blended family. I basically told my wife she had to choose what kind of life she wanted: what we had versus what she dreamed up. We went to therapy and we worked through it—or so I thought.
We recently went through a crisis where one of our kids had an unplanned pregnancy and they chose to end it. We are lucky to live in a blue state but the situation was fraught. My wife’s reaction blindsided me. She was so angry and felt she had been “cheated again” because we would’ve raised the baby if they kept it. Luckily, she didn’t say this around our kids, but her reaction makes me think our marriage is not salvageable. She told me she regrets not pushing for another child and that I forced her to give up her dream. She didn’t want to be a single mom again. She later apologized but is the damage done? We are both pushing 50 and I thought we were happy. Is counseling even possible at this point? I feel like I am living with a stranger ever since she confessed.
—No Baby
Dear No Baby,
Sure, your wife may have been dishonest with you about her enduring desire to have kids—despite working through this years ago—but it’s also possible that the ordeal with the abortion triggered her former desires in a way that surprised everyone, including herself. Just because she’s made peace with your shared decision to not have a baby doesn’t mean that she can’t still mourn a version of a life that she once wanted.
I don’t think there’s an easy way to tell at this point which scenario applies here. I think it would be a good idea to revisit counseling, since that seemed helpful in giving you both some additional support when you were making the decision to not have a child the first time around. Your wife might simply need a space where her feelings of regret and grief feel validated, and you both might find it helpful to “review,” so to speak, the original decision and how its impacted your lives. I’m not suggesting you both revisit the decision itself, but just because it was made years ago doesn’t mean you can’t still talk about how it’s affected both of you. In fact, it’s probably healthier to look back at something so big with the perspective you’ve gained since.
no subject
Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
I really hope counseling can help them. I ache for them both.
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And yeah, all that would be dredged up again during and after the crisis. Imho Wife is mourning the loss of what she felt was her last opportunity to have that baby with LW (or in this case, grandbaby). I think LW needs let Wife grieve, as well as attend marriage counselling to address Wife's lingering regret.
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OTOH, parenting is hard enough when we were both fully committed to it.
It's hard and difficult on both sides.
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I had zero by choice and I chose to have a tubal and I still grieved intensely, and every time one of my friends' kids or my niblings hits a life stage I grieve again. And it was entirely my choice. Sometimes humans want contradictory things. People are messy.
LW's wife needs space for those feelings, and LW needs empathy for the complexity of human emotion.
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(I’m 100% pro-choice, but I also made sure, including doubling up on birth control methods, that I didn’t wind up pregnant again after my life-threatening first pregnancy — in part because I knew that terminating would have an entirely different emotional resonance for me.)
I hope that they can get counseling, and that LW can get past the idea that his wife was somehow dishonest in agreeing to no more children — neither of them had expected that one of their kids would have an unplanned pregnancy and create the “chance” to potentially parent another child who was biologically related to one of them.
no subject