Most of what I want to say has been said. Counseling, yes. Baby, not quite yet, but seriously: be certain before you give up your opportunity.
The only newish addition I have is this; there is something you are craving which your husband is not providing. I’m not sure it’s a baby. Exploring (just in your own head, mind you) the attraction to wobbly-guts may give you the clue you need about what’s missing. He obviously is an expert at spotting the unmet needs of the women around him, and fills them just enough to get what he wants.
Also, is hubby moving like lightening to find a job, fix the situation, so that children are possible, or is he slugging about and dragging his feet? It’s been my experience that when I think I know what a man “really wants” the truth is I’m trying to impose my wishful thinking on him. Most men will show you exactly what they want if you just observe their actions.
When he says he wants kids, is he really saying that he’s not ready to give you up? Because believe me, this Momhood thing is harder than it looks, and you don’t want to do it with a man who isn’t going to be 100% taking his share of it. In my case, Momhood was the number one thing I wanted from my life, and I am grateful and honored every day by the opportunity. But if that weren’t true, I know I would have had a complete breakdown long ago. Single Momhood is a hard, hard, road, and plenty of married Moms are functionally single Moms.
If parenthood is not the be-all end-all of your life, then don’t do it; because it WILL be the be-all end-all once the child is there.
He says that yes, he does want kids with me (though “with me” includes potentially adopting with me, in both our minds; I was adopted myself). As for biology… this man that I love more than any other human being is a world-class procrastinator, of the “I can’t do it unless I have time to do it perfectly” variety. Major life decisions paralyze him; it’s been a recurring theme in the 12 years we’ve been together, half of those married. It was a major theme in his life before we met. He knows this about himself and has had years of therapy for it and related issues.
Yep. You nailed it.
There’s already plenty of smiling in both directions. Plenty of daily kindnesses, gentle kisses, and pleasant chats. Plenty of dealing with normal daily issues like cat barf and gardening. Not so much making of babies.
Actually, we’re both interested in adoption as an option. Unfortunately, if one wishes to adopt a healthy infant, being over 40 is often a non-starter with adoption agencies.
It’s not all about having kids, for sure. It’s also about midlife crisis type stuff, maybe more so.
Well, that’s the thing. I believe it is. Husband does not.
Again, husband is of the “can’t do it unless I know I can do it perfectly” bent of mind. If I don’t lose my job due to the nasty economy, which I believe to be unlikely in the next 18 months due to contractual obligations, we could easily afford a kid now even without him working; we have a decent-sized house and reasonable mortgage payments. He feels excruciating shame that I’ve been supporting him in grad school; at the moment, while he’s dissertating, he’s not even TAing or anything and is bringing in only about $100-150 a week from odd jobs. This bothers *me *not even a tiny bit, which I’ve told him repeatedly and will tell him again, as clearly as I know how. Couples do that. My mom supported my dad, then my dad supported my mom, while they were getting their respective degrees back in the day.
Really, that touches on the larger issue. I had a happy childhood with great parenting. His folks divorced when he was seven and he ended up neglected. I fundamentally believe that while parenting is certainly not easy, it is done well by many, and we can do it too. It would take over our lives, but in the right way. I believe I will be a good mother, that my husband will be an excellent father… but he is terrified that he’ll FAIL FAIL FAIL because he isn’t 100% sure he knows how.
Weeellllll… that’s hard to gauge, due to the perfectionist thing. He is working 10-12 hours a day on average (weekends too) on the dissertation, but it’s more or less overdue. Some advisers recommend he just stop wherever he is and turn the damn thing in. Others are interested in his material and are encouraging him to hash it out. Husband is a massive procrastinator, but when he does finish a job – and he usually does eventually finish – his work is the best you’ll ever see, whether it’s building raised garden beds or challenging long-sacrosanct but dysfunctional academic dogma.
The thing, the dark ugly thing I hate to think about, is that Husband is worried *he’ll *be functionally a single dad, that I will wimp out and that he’ll have to do it all. He does not shy from any responsibility he has agreed to take on; in my opinion, he has sometimes done so even when he shouldn’t have. I believe some projects should be abandoned, that you have to consider priorities, and that some things can be let go in order that the important things *can *be done. I think Husband isn’t convinced a child would be my top priority. I don’t think he’s rational about this; I think he’s coming from deep old fears of abandonment. It hurts rather a lot to think he doesn’t trust me in this respect, although I think he wants to trust me so. This is the essential shadow in our marriage, for me.
Husband unfortunately has an unshakable belief that feeling bad is morally superior to feeling good. He honestly believes that if he is guilty of something, say for instance not calling his (now late) grandmother for months, that he has a moral responsibility to feel bad as a kind of penance. I think he has a moral responsibility to *just call her already, *and that the feeling bad is required only inasmuch as it motivates you to change your wrong behavior. Call her, put it on your calendar to call her every Saturday, continue to call her every Saturday, and then go happily skipping through the dandelions if you like. He interprets this, I think, as meaning that I don’t take responsibility seriously. This issue has raised the only serious fights we’ve ever had.
I don’t agree with “be-all end-all” exactly. I would say “child takes priority over anything and everything else,” not that all parents sacrifice all other aspects of their lives. They may be called on to sacrifice some or many or nearly all or even, in rare cases, all, and that I am willing to do. I don’t think a parent who lives only for her child is a healthy parent. I would also say “child takes priority over parent’s convenience, comfort, ease, preference, etc.” and “child gets needs met before parent does”. Also, “parent’s life will be completely and utterly different with child around than it was before.”
Ann Landers way back had a similar letter and she responded in an unexpected way and one that I think hit the nail on the head.
The letter was from a wife, no children, who was stay at home to a successful husband. She wrote that she loved her husband very much but was being tempted by other guys. The latest being an appliance repairman. She said she hasn’t acted on it but it disturbed her.
Ann replied something to the effect of that she had too much free time. Idle hands made for wandering minds. She needed to get a job, maybe even 2 of them.
Now, I’m sure this doesn’t apply to you OP…just throwing it out…
In your case, I think it is your human animal coming out. Husband is supposed to breadwinner and manly confident. He is supposed to want to have kids…He is hitting 0/3 so your animal part is looking elsewhere
I’m not going to address the temptation. Been there.
I am going to address your desire for a child and your husbands lack. It took 10 years together before my husband caved. There is no good time to have a child. What I know now, that I didn’t know then, was that my husband became a drug addict and spent my entire pregnancy unemployed and on drugs, hiding financial ruin from us. Our daughter is now 3. I’m 41 and probably a little late to be thinking about child number 2. We are still together. He is the most attentive, adoring father. Still needs work on the husband stuff, but we are working on it.
You aren’t just looking at that guy to be looking. You are looking at that guy wondering what HE can give you that your husband can’t/won’t. Every time your husband says no to you and your biological gong goes off, like it or not, that is probably a point for the other guy.
Whether or not you and your husband ever have children, I can assure you, if your husband is to you what you say he is, you would be risking an awful lot, for not very much.
We don’t often think of the hard facts of what could really happen to us when we do stupid shit. Please think about it. I may be way off base with your particulars, but I’ve got 4 years of a very, very long road behind me that I wish neither one of us had ever stepped foot down. Neither one of us can make it go away and we hate it every single day.
Yeah, BlinkingDuck, I think you’re 0 for 2 there. A), I work full time, and 2), I buy in 0% to the “manly = confident breadwinner” deal, as I said above.
(I added the bolding.) Auntbeast, I don’t think I understand what you’re saying here. There is no good time to have a child? I’d agree that there’s no good time to have a child *with someone who doesn’t want one, *or *with someone who’s about to become a drug addict, *but do you really mean to generalize beyond that? Neither one of you can make what go away – the choice to have a kid? The financial ruin?
You’re absolutely right, and I have thought quite a lot about what would happen if I did this particular stupid shit. The fact that I was (at the time I wrote the OP) still thinking about this stupid shit anyway was making me wonder about my sanity. Talking it out here has pretty much banished that particular stupid shit from my head, for which I thank all of you and the SDMB gods. It really has helped.
Maybe it’s reading a bit too much between the lines, but my reading was that wanting a kid seemed to be the largest motivator towards going over and getting knocked up by Mr. Belly. Ultimately there’s easier solutions than that. Adding Belly to the equation is, in the end, going to add a lot more angst and anger to your relationship than trying to convince your husband to give you a child. If you adopt, you don’t have to worry about the age issue so much, and you can get a kid who’s already past the baby stage, which is the part where you have to get no sleep and clean up poop and piss and vomit several times a day–AKA the principal reasons to not get a kid.
It’s true that adopting an older kid could ameliorate our age problem, and honestly if we don’t get this settled in the next year or so I hope that’s what we’d do. However, my husband’s principal reasons to not get a kid are a little more complicated than you describe, and seem to be that a) he isn’t convinced he could be a good enough father, and b) he isn’t convinced I wouldn’t make him do all the hard parts – including diapers, but even more so discipline issues, paying attention to the kid when the kid is being boring, etc. In the words of the Motherlode blog at the NYT:
I believe Husband’s afraid I’d be like Ms Belkin, minus the part in the next paragraph of the entry where she talks about “parallel play” as the solution to her dirty secret. He was a shy only child raised by a depressed single mother and never got the attention he craved. He knows I have depressive tendencies. I also get migraines. He’s afraid he’ll have to be the “real parent” and I’ll deign to come help when it suits me. This hurts my feelings and makes me very sad, but I have no way to disprove it before the fact.
I can see how you’d get that reading. I don’t think I really wanted to get knocked up over there, though.
You are 100% correct. I like to think there was never any *real *chance of me going for that visit. I think… if you’ll pardon the metaphor, I think I was poking at an itchy scab, not because I wanted to bleed, but because I want it to hurry up and fall off already and it won’t. I really want to have this out with Husband, but he’s resistant to having that conversation in full while he’s in the final stages of his dissertation. He’s going to have it whether he likes it or not eventually: post-defense or about August or so, whichever comes first.
But seriously, looks don’t count for much. Some ugly men get laid, some attractive men go to bed lonely. This guy has something that your hubby doesn’t and he’s hooked you with it.
I have to wonder about some of these threads of late.
“My boyfriend’s a great guy, but for about a year and a half he’s been forcing me to wear jackboots and a shitty diaper and play “La Marseillaise” on a kazoo while he fucks my sister. When I try to tell him it bothers me, he blows his nose in my hair and says I’m cramping his style. Should I just let it go?”
We had a neighbor kind of like this - made passes at everything that moved, including my wife. I called him on it, and he was essentially a coward. But he still hit on everyone he could get away with.
Then he got cancer, was getting divorced, and hooked up with his oncologist. Convinced her to buy his house that he hadn’t paid the mortgage on for half a year, because the business he and his wife started (with her $200000) went to hell. He sold the house to his oncologist for more than it was worth, making her believe it was worth still more.
He died; she got shafted out of $60,000 - $100,000.
And his online obituary had dozens of notes from other women he’d slept with.
You said this guy had lots of affairs, so he doesn’t want you in particular. If you ask your husband to actually have words with him, the guy will go away forever. If you don’t ask your husband to, ask yourself why not.
Hmmmnnn. Another WAG to consider. . . Is it possible that wobbly-guts epresents a dope-smack to launch your husband out of his procrastination? I have a friend whose husband can’t start any project or make any final decision until she forces the issue with an object lesson.
Like when they needed a new sofa and after six months he hadn’t made a decision. She settled on a Store she liked, and had them delive the most hideous lime green and burnt orange creation imaginable to their almost Victorian living room. He then had 28 days to pick a trade-in from the same store. Worked like a charm.
Or when they needed a new stove and he kept saying “wait unitl this one dies.” She pulled all the plugs from the stove-top so they could only use the oven. After a week’s worth of breakfast casseroles he was ready that saturday to go to the store and come home with a new one.
Maybe he has trained you to find the catalyst to jump-start him?
That’s what I meant by be-all end-all. You will no longer be the priority in your own life. My daughter is not the only thing in my life, nor is she in any way responsible for my self-esteem. But nothing I could do would be enough to make me feel good about my day if I had also failed to meet her needs.
I still may (sigh). Why not so far:
[LIST=a]
[li]Husband has said he’d rather not.[/li][li]All three of us are still involved with that community artistic endeavor and REALLY don’t want to change that. It’s a central part of all our lives. This guy is simply *not *going to “go away” completely unless someone runs him out of town on a rail (which Husband is *definitely *not up for).[/li][li]As mentioned we’re suddenly all neighbors now, and having words with one’s neighbors – well, in an old small town neighborhood like this, everyone would find out almost instantly, and I would never live it down. (Did I mention how much the fellow reminds me of a classic drama queen?)[/li][li]I am hoping, though, that his stay in this immediate neighborhood will be brief, as he’s essentially crashing with a friend. For now, he doesn’t actually know where we live. He’s shortsighted and we haven’t been by to knock on his door with the Welcome Wagon. In the most Panglossian of worlds, he will never know, he will quickly move elsewhere, and all will be well.[/li][li]The guy has been behaving himself around me since Husband got back. The words-having would be more about me and my (monumentally stupid) temptations than about putting him in line. I’d like to think – and so far, really, I do have reason to think – that I can handle my (monumentally stupid) temptations myself. The OP was a nadir.[/li][/LIST]
Sure there is. It’s just that as a woman, you choose to ignore it.
Logically, there is something missing in your relationship with your husband. It may be the fact that you want to have kids and he doesn’t. Maybe it’s the fact that your husband wasn’t around for the better part of a year.
Logic would also dictate that you have some self esteem issues as a borderline overweight almost 40 year old. Not crippling or anything, but the usual “am I still attractive” kind of stuff.
There may also be a sense that if you want to have kids, your husband relenting seems like a better bet than striking off on your own and finding a new partner. I can’t say if that’s true or not, but it is certainly a risk.
Maybe you should take the emotion out of it for a bit, look at your husband logically and figure out if this is what you want. Your fat, unemployed, lawnmowing, bigmouth player of a neighbor is likely not the problem (sweet jesus). But he may be a symptom of a problem with you and your husband.
