He's Not Ready For A Child, And I'm Sad.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
141

mnemosyne, I really appreciated every word of your post. There has been a lot to sort out in this short time and being able to post in this thread – the crazy stuff and the sensible stuff – has been really helpful. I know not everyone understands where all these intense feelings and emotions are coming from, and I don’t completely understand myself, but my intent to put them out there is always so that I can examine them more critically and make the most informed choices I can. Some people call that hyper-analysis, but for me it’s just how I make good decisions.

I do want to help him solve it. But I don’t want to put any pressure on him either. That is, I guess, where I’m stuck. Some people have expressed in this thread the possibility that he will never want children, but I don’t think that’s true. Not because I couldn’t accept it (I most definitely could, with time) but because he’s never wavered in that desire. From the first day I met him he’s wanted children, even at times when I wasn’t sure I did. I really do think, all evidence on the table, that he’s just in a different place than I am right now on when would be best to do it.

And maybe the most fundamental disconnect there was that when we both agreed we wanted kids, ‘‘someday,’’ we had different conceptualizations of what ‘‘someday’’ meant. My ‘‘someday,’’ in a sense, is about to arrive, whereas his hasn’t yet. We’re not educationally ‘‘in sync’’ – we chose different career tracks and different paths to get there. So it makes sense that we have different feelings of readiness.

The best thing I think I can do to make this fair is to adopt that attitude that we are not ready to have children and think of it entirely as the readiness of us as a couple rather than something that starts with me. Because I think the biggest mistake I made about this was thinking it was all about me, instead of all about ‘‘us,’’ ‘‘us’’ of course including the new addition to our family. I think the reason I did this is mostly because of the disconnect and isolation I have been feeling from the rest of the world, and the first step to getting into a healthier place is going to be about restoring that connection.

I have found the Straight Dope a more convenient substitute for face-to-face interaction and getting out into the world, but I think part of this means having the internet take a more tertiary role in my life and focusing more on my immediate environment and people in it. And of course Sr. Olives and I will continue to work on ways to make our relationship more positive, though honestly I think our relationship is the best thing either of us have going right now.

This is a valid point. We had always planned on adopting because it was what I wanted most. He agreed because his little sister is adopted and she is incredibly precious to him, so he is very pro-adoption as well. I had never wanted to conceive but going through this process I was able to get really excited about the idea, I guess because part (not all) of my desire to adopt came from personal issues that I guess really are not intractable. So even though I do have a very strong desire to adopt, it will probably be important for us to keep both options on the table.

The kid thing was a factor in not pursuing the Ph.D., but there are also other reasons. I have always considered a Ph.D. but prior to coming out to Jersey with my husband I had a very idealized conception of what that actually meant. First I saw the incredible stress my husband was under, then I went through the incredible stress of my first year of MSW at a school where the environment is very elitist and political. I have always been a high academic achiever, I have developed a newfound passion for research, and one of my greatest talents is writing, so the Ph.D. would be suitable for my talents and interests and I might well be very successful. I was encouraged by professors to apply and felt a lot of pressure or sense that I ‘‘should’’ do it because it was the ‘‘perfect job.’’

But going through the last year of school I have seen how influenced I am by the politics and competition and basically the effect on me personally is very negative. I become hyper-competitive and achievement-oriented and start to invest all of my self-worth into my academic achievement. Once I realized the amount of stress I would go through for almost no change in income, along with how difficult it would be for Sr. Olives and I to both find employment in the same area, it became clear that this was not really something I wanted to do, just something that sounded good on paper.

So, I’m going to receive my MSW in the Spring. An MSW from this school is a perfectly good degree, and it will give me the kind of job doing something that I find genuinely fulfilling. It’s perfectly possible to do research with an MSW but I guess more importantly, it’s an environment where the goal is not status and personal achievement, but rather making the community a better place. That is the kind of work that I really love, because I’m not constantly thinking about how I stack up against other people, I’m just enjoying being a part of something meaningful. It’s not a job where you make a lot of money, but it you find the right organization, it can be a job that offers tremendous personal fulfillment.

Does that make sense?

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I just wanted to say that olives, I have been impressed by the grace and thoughtfulness with which you’ve handled an amount of criticism that frankly would have made me WAY more defensive.

Also, about the “HR” attitude towards life: my husband and I do something fairly similar, because both of us are pretty laid back and if we don’t do things like set a timetable for things like checking in to see whether we’re ready to make steps toward getting married and having kids they would get done when we were about 80. Neither of us thought of it as punitive, and I was shocked that apparently a lot of other people do.

It’s totally understandable for the kids decision to be more about the woman when she’s the one who has to conceive/bear (and in my case we were worried about running into age issues which forced our hand a little), but yes, you’re right that it does have to be about both of you.

ETA: Oh, I absolutely know the feeling of wanting kids “someday… okay, when is that exactly??” I’d like to reassure you, too, that mr. hunter was in a very similar place (actually, even further behind than Sr. Olives, in the sense that though he thought having kids was probably a net plus, he never wanted kids as much as it sounds like your husband does), and we did get to the point where we agreed that someday = now.

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Thanks for your continued support.

I just wanted to add that one more good thing has come out of this thread. He is working his way through it now, and he saw that I referred to him as ‘‘ABD’’ once he finishes his Masters. There was a massive misunderstanding between me and Sr. Olives about where he was at in his program. I assumed after he finished with his Masters next Spring, he would be ABD, so next year he would be mostly working from home on just the one thing.

Not true. He has a more spread-out class schedule and will have to do his Qualifying Examinations, more coursework and his typical clinical load all next year, and that is in addition to his labwork. His program is really not structured the way a lot of Ph.D. programs are because of the nature of the field. In addition to research he has to log practice hours continuously. He is really going to continue to be incredibly busy with multiple different responsibilities right up until internship year.

Once I realized all the shit he still has ahead of him, it was immediately obvious to me why he doesn’t feel ready for a child. I wouldn’t be ready for a kid in that position either. I just failed to see where he was at because I was so looking forward to my own liberation from academia come this Spring.

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Wow - I’m getting tired just looking at the list of what he’ll be doing to get his PhD. I think the correct response when you brought up having kids should have been, “What? Hell no!” :slight_smile:

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Yeah, once he explained it all to me I realized no man in his right mind would agree to this unless he really was excited about the idea of having children. If anything it just reinforces my belief that he’s not just telling me what I want to hear when he says he does want kids someday.

My husband is reading this thread now and he says he now picturing Dio as a Klingon Warrior ready to strike wtih his mighty bat’leth. ‘‘YOU have no honor!’’

He too appreciates the diversity of opinions being expressed here, including the comic bits. :smiley:

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I picture him more like this. :smiley:

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olives - You can tell him he can join our merry band. I’m sure he’s impressed with our collective intelligence and erudition.

StG

148

I’ve been working on him, really, but he just keeps saying he’s not ready to be a Doper. :wink:

149

Is there really such thing as being “ready” for children? i think it’s really a question of desire more than readiness. I’m not ready now but i will be someday to me means “i don’t want kids now but i assume i will change my mind eventually”.

150

Ask him what it would take, when that might be… :smiley:

I disagree. I really want to be a mother. I want to be pregnant and I want to feel that baby grow inside me and I want to watch it grow up…but hell, no, I’m not ready for that now! Someday, though! Until then, I need to finish school, get a job and start a career that interests me, maybe move to another apartment, if not a home that we buy…then having a kid seems like something I can manage. I guess no one is every ready for a child, but you can be ready for the challenge. I’m not. And I’m older than olives, so you’d think time would be pressing on me more, but nope.

151

I agree, I think you can know you want kids eventually, but also know that you aren’t in a good place for them now. And, while I don’t think anyone is really ready for kids, and they change your life fundamentally, I also think that for tens of thousands of years people had kids - that’s what they did and they coped.

We got married and started trying to conceive after six months. We’d known each other a LONG time. We had two good jobs. It didn’t happen for us. At each stage of our fertility - adoption journey, we checked in with each other and made sure that the next step was mutually acceptable. We even set checkpoints - think about adopting for two weeks and then come back - we both agreed with was a good idea.

And - surprise - our children arrived six months apart because we had a surprise pregnancy. We initially planned to have two bio children - they should be 15 and 13 right now. Then we decided that wouldn’t work for us and we’d have two Korean children, two years apart. They should be 12 and 10. And we have a 12 year old and an 11 year old, both who arrived in our lives in their own way and on their own schedule.

You cope. You cope with kids, you cope without kids. There are definite advantages to being child free. And there are very good reasons not to identify yourself by your roles.

I think it will work out for you Olives, you just need to be patient.

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Hey olives, sweetie - it’s late & I don’t have the patience to read all 3 pages but I read your OP and first reply & had to write.

I’m so sorry you’re sad and mourning. Mourning your immediate future and the effort you’ve put into planning. And I’m sorry for your disappointment in your husband.

I am totally NOT surprised that he freaked out, because of him being accustomed to being in control. Poor sentence, but you get my drift — the reality of parenthood is, you’re NOT in control. And I think the only way to accept that is to live through it.

In fact, here’s the deal as I see it - he doesn’t NEED to be 100% okay with fatherhood ahead of time. I know there are some men out there who truly take care of infants, I know they exist. I am not married to one. It has taken my (Ph.D.-having, control-accustomed-to) husband SIX YEARS to become acclimated to fatherhood. Just about destroyed our marriage & caused plenty of problems w/the kids, BUT he pulled it together.

I’m saying, it’s okay to not be 100% ready, because nobody ever IS.

OTOH - I think you should wait until you move back to Chicago, before having kids. Because (assuming you’re on a good footing with them?) you’ll really want and need your family, when you’re a new mom.

I also think you’d be wise to put in a couple of years of working, first. Because motherhood, well, it’s not exactly INTELLECTUALLY stimulating. It’s the best job ever, don’t get me wrong. But being a SAHM can also make you feel brain-dead. Lost. Because, face it, there are no 14-month-olds on the Dope. Babies do not make good debaters. In fact, when they start to talk, the rhetoric soon goes south, “Tookie! Tookie!” “Here, have a cookie” “Wann dat tookie!” (pointing to the one you’re eating) “Sure, you have my cookie” followed by “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH” (because it’s already been bitten, isn’t chocolate chip, it’s Tuesday, whatever). Or, alternatively, “No, this is my cookie” followed by “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH” and next thing you know, you’re wrestling a small child over a Nutter Butter.

Motherhood’s great, but oh, no, it’s not everything.

I say: Get something of your OWN, before you have a child. Work on your identity a bit. The healthier, the more complete YOU are, the better a mother you’ll be.

Babies are a breeze - exhausting, but easy. It’s the 2-yr-olds and 3-yr-olds who drive us bananas and bring out the ghosts of our past. And the 5-yr-olds who start to have a life of their own, leaving us with…ourselves.

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Hi. I know nothing about anything much, but three things jumped out at me:

  1. One of the effects of PTSD can be that you see stuff (specially negative stuff) as all-encompassing. After years of being a very reliable guy, your husband has acted unreliable once - so you instantly see that as negating everything else he’s ever been or done. In actual fact, what it means is that he’s 99.99% reliable and 0.01% unreliable. He’s not one solid block of a single quality - because human beings just aren’t. They’re complicated and contradictory. He can be a mixture of two opposing qualities in different proportions, and that doesn’t cancel out either one.

  2. You said you were putting a new level of force behind resolving your problems with intimacy, because you need to sort that stuff out in order to conceive a baby. If you were my friend, this right here is where I would go WHOA. I would tell you that you need to put that level of passion and force into sorting out this problem for YOU. You need to put it in for your husband. Both of you deserve that.

  3. Our kid just turned 1 so I have a very clear sense of That First Year. One reason the intense preparation comes across as weird is that you cannot prepare yourself. End of story. I promise you, there is no such thing as being prepared for this enormous and wonderful and exhausting upheaval. Financially, sure, prepare - good idea. Emotionally, not a chance. And the more thoroughly prepared you think you are, the bigger the shock you’re gonna get when the baby arrives.

Partly this is because the person whose arrival you’re trying to prepare for doesn’t exist yet. You have no clue who this person is going to be - they genuinely do come with personalities of their own, sometimes very strong ones - and that will play a HUGE role in defining every facet of the experience. The first year (actually, the rest of your life) is going to be a three-person adventure, not a two-person one. So when you talk about being prepared, it reads as if you’ve forgotten that there’s a third person involved. This may well not be the case, but that’s how it reads.

154

I read the O.P. in your other thread.

I’m guessing that you’ve laid a good part of your suffering on his head, which is understandable.

He’s gone against his gut reaction, which probably involves financial security, to try and spare you further emotional suffering, but in the end sense has overruled an unrealistic desire on your part .

Your recent desire to have a child seems to have come about as a reaction to seeing your mentally ill mother and is probably not the best reason to bring a new life into the world.

It might be a good idea to come to terms with your childhood and your mother issues rather then try to heal yourself by the dubious process of childbirth.

The hormonal changes alone involved in pregnancy and post natally may in fact make you feel worse not better.

The stress on your marriage for financial reasons, plus possible lurking resentment on your husbands part, not to mention the lack of sleep and the wearying process of 24/7 baby care are not going to help either.

I feel for you, but having a baby is not an all healing panacea.
I hope that you start feeling better soon.

155

Thanks everyone for more input.

Around the house, things have basically returned to normal. Sr. Olives did actually sit down and think about when he’ll be ready to have children, and his new estimate is about five years from now, when we’ve both been working for two years. He says by then he will either have learned to cope with the stress of academia or will be ready to look into doing something else.

The input in this thread made me realize I probably don’t want to deal with being pregnant as a grad student. After some thought I think my ideal would be to start the process (be it adoption or conception) next year after I graduate. So as you can see we still aren’t seeing eye-to-eye on this.

We’re back to typical days around here, lots of love and support for one another, but I don’t feel back to normal on the inside. Considering I’ve already been waiting for years, five years seems like an awful long time. People are awfully quick to discuss the potential he would have resentment if forced to have children too soon, and I get that, because there’s a child involved, but I don’t want to resent him, either, and right now, I find that I do. I’m calm now, but still fundamentally pretty angry and hurt about this situation. I’ve been all about doing what I can to make him feel comfortable with the idea and the process, and I have respected his feelings on this for years, but apparently it’s okay for me to feel uncomfortable, I should just shut up and deal. I don’t really think that’s fair. I understand why his discomfort should be given greater weight (because of another, vulnerable person involved) but I don’t understand why mine is basically irrelevant.

I’m trying to find what’s fair for both of us. I think we really are going to need counseling because as much as I don’t want my husband to resent me, I don’t want to resent him either. Even if the purpose of the counseling is just for me to accept how wrong I am, then at least we’d have a way to deal with it. As it stands right now I really don’t know the best way to deal with these feelings without being unfair to my husband.

I’m also trying to keep in mind this has been an incredibly stressful couple of months. After the whole Mom/adoption fiasco I returned to a home invasion by my mother-in-law and immediately following that a member of my husband’s department died, then I was sick for three weeks straight (can’t get off the couch sick) and now my husband and I are both sick again. It has been two months of stress and sickness. Anybody would be a little ‘‘off’’ in that situation.

I’m frustrated with the way this situation has been distorted by the strength of emotion in my posts. I have strong emotions, but they don’t rule my behavior. Sure there’s fear, anxiety, uncertainty, discomfort, anger, whatever – I’ve lived with those all my life and they don’t control me. I know for a fact that my desire to have a child is not unhealthy and doesn’t have anything to do with my Mom. I am more at peace with my mother’s mental illness than I have ever been. I didn’t suddenly decide I wanted to be a parent, I’ve wanted to be a parent for a long while, though over the last two years the desire has grown in intensity. The experience of being offered a child this summer made me realize I was tired of passively waiting. And I still am. And there’s nothing unhealthy, weird, self-absorbed, or pathological about that.

If people want to assume my motives are messed-up, there’s nothing I can really do about that, other than to say that I submit myself to rigorous self-examination on a routine basis and have been quite adept at spotting unhealthy behavior and mindset when I see it. I’m not going to pretend it’s as easy for me as it is for less neurosis-prone people, but I wouldn’t be as successful and stable as I am if it weren’t for my ability to call myself on my own bullshit. In this case recovering from mental health issues was an absolute gift - because it gave me insight into myself and a certain fearlessness about challenging my own thoughts and attitudes. For those who want to see that as a weakness it’s your prerogative, but I’m done defending myself for what I view as one of my greatest strengths.

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Five years seems a little long to me, too. I think starting the process after you graduate is more reasonable, assuming he would be in a better place by then - I gathered that his work load would drop somewhat in the next couple of years, right?

Counseling sounds like a really good idea to help you guys get through this.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he ends up being okay with having kid sooner than that, by the way. I deal with things that make me really nervous like that too - by setting a really long time span so I don’t even have to really contemplate it, when in fact I could probably handle it sooner.

It also kind of sounds like he expects things to have settled down a lot by then (kind of the way you were looking at things, that this period would end and then things would be fine and you could get on with living), and you might remind him that there probably won’t ever be an ideal time to have a kid if you look at it that way - there will always be *some *amount of stress and busyness, because that’s just the way life is. The key is to get it down to manageable.

(I don’t know your husband enough to know if that’s what’s happening here, of course.)

Good luck! I hope things work out well, and I’m quite confident they will, based on what I know of you and your husband and marriage.

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Even if there are prudent time adjustments, pushing having kids five yours into the future five years is absurd for a 27 year old professional. There is absolutely no real desire or inclination on his part to have child regardless of what he’s telling you to mollify you and handle you in the near term. Five years is so absurd, so truly absurd, that most reasonable women would look at that scenario and go " You know, I really don’t think he wants a kid" and make their decisions based on that realization.

Whether it’s because he can’t handle the concept due to stress, doesn’t feel the need to breed, doesn’t want to share his life with you with another person, or is simply not a fan of kids in general is kind of beside the point. Beating this to death in counseling is not going to change his mind on this issue.

He loves you and he cares for you, but the reality is he doesn’t want to have kids period, or he doesn’t want to have them with you. Women are often stunned and hurt when a relationship ends, where their ex-SO was either adamantly anti-kids or just avoidant on the topic, the SO remarries and his new wife is popping them out like corn muffins. He should want to have kids with you, and should be seeing what strings he can pull to make this happen. Instead it’s back burnered half a decade into the future toward the end of your prime child bearing years.

At the risk or stirring up the natives there is a Mars-Venus aspect to this you don’t seem to be grokking. This is not a man who has kids or other baggage, this is an employed, professional who is married, has no children, and has a wife who is eager to have kids. Speaking as a man, for a happily married man to stand in the face of that freight train of desire on the part of his loving wife, and decide to push it onto a track five years into the future … I mean seriously what is going to take before you wake up and smell the coffee?

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FIVE YEARS??? And what if in five years he still doesn’t feel ready? That is WAY too long a time to wait. There are big red flags here. If, at his age, he still doesn’t think he’ll be ready for five more years, there’s something very wrong. I’d say he isn’t going to want kids then, either. You might have to start making some decisions about what you want from your life. Do you want to have family, or be wedded to a man who won’t let you have one?

159

Going just by what’s been said in this thread, I have to agree that it sounds like Mr. Olives really just doesn’t want kids right now, and has set a ridiculously long timeframe of five years, possibly in the hopes that sometime in that period, his mind will change.

This is a really frustrating and hurtful situation for you, Olives, and I wish I had some words of advice to make it easier. I went through something similar with MrWhatsit; we were living together and happy, and I wanted to get married, and he didn’t. A lot of your posts here remind me a lot of that situation, with the lengthy talks and the hurt feelings and attempts to set a deadline, and just, ugh. God. Horrible. I almost left him. (I wasn’t going to set an ultimatum; I was just going to go. But things turned around shortly before I got to that point.)

Anyway, my point is, I have a lot of sympathy for you in this situation. I wish there was something more helpful I could say.

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Five years is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous.