Dealing with the decision to stop having kids when you're the one who wants more

In My Humble Opinion
21

I am getting the impression that this is an issue that should be talked out with your therapist or a couples’ therapist - I feel like the issue here is not having a third child, but something else that you’re not dealing with. Your life sounds pretty good right now, yet not having a third child is devastating you? Has having a third child achieved some kind of mystical status in your mind or something, that you’ve made it out to be much bigger than it actually is? I think you have a bit of digging to do still.

(My internet stranger’s opinion, and worth every penny! :slight_smile: )

22

Having children is one area where I think the person who says No gets to have the ultimate say. Having children can be stressful and it takes a lot out of your life. For your husband, perhaps he realizes that he doesn’t want to deal with that stress anymore. Having an additional child means it will be longer until he can enjoy life as he wants again. To you it means you don’t get to experience the happiness of another child, but there are many other ways to be happy.

Having another child means your husband will have to deal with more stress. Not having a child just means you have one less way to be happy. Find another way to achieve happiness in your life.

What if you tried to have a child and it didn’t work? Would you spend the rest of your life feeling sad you didn’t have #3, or would you move on and fill your life with other activities that made you happy?

I dealt with this situation. My wife wanted another one and I didn’t. The stress level was way to high for me. I said no way to another child. My wife said it felt like she was mourning over our unborn child. I can understand where she’s coming from, but I just couldn’t go through it again. And after a little while she was fine (maybe a week?) I’m sure it will be different for each person.

23

This pretty much. You had a good run with two great kids. This huge obsession about needing to have third is the strongest argument against having a third. You both have lots of debt racked up, not a lot of resources, and now you want to kick a third into the mix, because even though you’ve had serious stress related mental issues while raising your kids everything’s OK right now?

You need to sit back and take stock of the entire situation. Your husband is not the one being unreasonable in this scenario.

24

Genuinely curious here (I’m on Adderall which is a big no-no for pregnancy) - if you can’t function without your meds, why get pregnant again, whether it’s a surrogacy or regular pregnancy? I’d assume you’d have to go off of them for 9 months, no?

25

May I also suggest counselling. I was the one who wanted a third child while my husband absolutely didn’t. My younger son is 27 now so I really should be over it but there’s a hole in my heart which will never go away.

26

This is very difficult and not unlike a situation I was in about 18 years ago.

The Hallgirls were about seven and nine and I was in a relationship with someone whom I loved very much. We’d been together for about four years total at that time, and he’d had a vasectomy very early on in our relationship.

I can’t really explain what happened, but there came a point in my life when I wanted another child. Was it a biological clock? Who knows. All I know is that it became horribly painful to be around women who were pregnant, babies, or toddlers. Every month that I got my period, my body would say, “I’m in mourning that you are not with child.”

Okay, a bit melodramatic, but this was a melodramatic period of my life. I wanted a third child. Desperately. Passionately.

And I knew it wasn’t happening–it couldn’t happen. Not with my partner.

The short of it was that we ended up breaking up. To this day, I believe that we both wanted different things in life. I wanted a third child, he didn’t. He wanted to have more time to focus on his career, which he did when we split. Shortly after we split, I became pregant (by someone else), and within a year, had Hallboy.

When I was pregnant with Hallboy, I knew it would be my last. I savored every single second of it (including morning sickness so bad I wanted to cry). When he was born, I savored every single second of his baby-ness, know it would be my last.

And I was perfectly fine with that.

Hallboy will be turning 18 before too long and I’ve never, ever once regretted having a third child. Might my relationship have lasted with my partner had I not wanted a third child? In retrospect, probably not, but me wanting a third child and him not wanting any kids, didn’t help our relationship.

I don’t have an answer for you, Avarie537. It’s one hell of a position to be in, and I know what it’s like to want a baby so badly that it nearly consumes your life.

27

Exactly! My kids are fantastic and amazing … and I want another one! Yes, I was horribly stressed out as a SAHM with two toddlers. I wouldn’t be doing that again. The idea was that I would stay home for 4-6 months and then go back to work.

This is where I am right now … feeling like all of that has been taken away. We always said “three” and I always thought I would get to do it all again.

Re: the meds. I take Adderall as needed and do fine without it. But I am on Celexa as well and have been for years. My OB/GYN knew that I was on it and was perfectly OK with me staying on it while pregnant and breastfeeding.

28

Won’t your grandchildren be like extra babies around? You will get the baby experience, but not the expense.

29

When my children were 5 and 2, I wanted another. Our original plan was to have 4. My husband was perfectly content at 2. Scratch that–he was actually opposed to any more. I was devastated, because I love being a mother, and I was a very good SAHM and could not understand why it mattered so much to him. But the fact of the matter is, I could not, would not, bring a child into this world that was not completely wanted by both parents.

So no matter how much it hurt me, and believe me, it did, I thought it would be more harmful to the child yet to be created to potentially be unwanted by his or her father. So I did what any reasonably sane woman would do–I insisted that if he did not want any more children, he could go get a vasectomy because I was not going to use birth control. :smiley: Well, he did. I grieved, and wrote a poem, titled curiously enough, Vasectomy. And in this poem, believe it or not, I worked out a lot of my grief.

Anyway, it stung for a few years, but looking back, I think it was the right choice. The partner who does not want more children has to be the one to make the final decision, IMO. But one final thought: no more could just mean no more right now. You could always add to the family later, even by adoption, should circumstances change.

30

Dealing with the decision - I think as much as possible you support each other as if it weren’t the other’s fault. Support your DH in his concerns about money, and about being an older parent. Seek his support for your grieving over the idea of not having three kids.

The situation sucks for both of you, really. But handled well, it can strengthen the two of you, and help you both come to terms with what the better choice is.

31

Update … we’ve recently had some more conversations about this that we needed to have. I told him that my expression of feeling these emotions was in no way shape or form an attempt to change his mind, and that I understood entirely his reservations, but I just had to let him know how I felt. Afterwards, he told me that his BIGGEST concern was not the money and not how old he would be when the baby was born, but my stress levels after the boys were born.

Well, that changes a lot. We both agree that I am leaps and bounds better than I was after the boys were born, and am probably in the best mental health state I’ve ever been. After being gone all day at a martial arts test today, he came home and said, “I want another baby.” So there’s a bit of a mixture of :eek: and :smiley: going on in my head right now. We’re going to take a hard look at finances and make sure we can make it work and then go from there.

32

Good luck!

BTW, this

And this

made me chuckle, since we adopted the Firebug when I was 55. :slight_smile:

Setting issues of finances aside, it’s really more about a combination of priorities (e.g. do you want to get to the point where the kids have moved out, at an age where you’re young enough to enjoy it?) and how old/young you think you’ll feel when you get to a certain age?

I expect to still be physically robust when the kid graduates from college, and I haven’t stopped growing yet in other ways, so I can’t see that I’m likely to anytime soon, so I ought to be able to keep up with the rascal as he grows up, to the extent that any parent at any age is able to.

There’s really no magic number for when you’re too old to become a parent. I’d say it would probably be a bummer for them if they can’t get to age 30 before they feel the need to call you almost daily to make sure you’re OK. And if you think you’re likely to go into full ‘kids these days’ mode before your hypothetical kid enters adulthood, then it’s probably best to keep the kid hypothetical. But if you don’t think either of these things is a worry, and you want another kid, then go for it.

33

Life doesn’t go the way we expect it to. Perhaps this is why you’re so upset? You weren’t expecting life to turn out this way?

It’s -1 kid. It will be O.K. Love the ones you have. Be practical. They’re growing up. Don’t miss it.

34

Glad to hear everything got worked out, OP. Good luck!!! :slight_smile: