Happy Whiny Wednesday! I hope you’re doing okay today. If not, this is the place to get it off your chest.
This week we turn to spotlight on the men in our lives and discuss the topic of:
Spouses or partners who aren’t dealing or healing
If you have one of these, we’d like to hear to about it.
My husband is content with us not having children right up until someone tells us we should have kids. His relationship with his father wasn’t great. His father was a total authoritarian and my husband now has issues with people who he feels is telling him he HAS to do something that he doesn’t want to do or has already decided not to do something.
A recent example is from Sunday. Our bishop felt the need to tell my husband that we should have children in our home. That there was a possibility for a miracle. And childREN was emphasized. Our bishop knows our situation, and even went thought infertility with his wife too. (They have one child.) My husband and I already had our own spiritual experience that we were to stop trying…5 years ago. So my husband now feels our bishop is telling him to do something that we have already made a decision on. Once my husband makes a decision, that is it….the subject is now closed. We made the decision to stop together (he let me have the final say on when we stopped), as painful as it was, and we have moved on to living a childless life.
My husband asked me what I would say to our bishop if he were to bring it up to me and I said I would tell him that there are children in our home…they just aren’t ours. My sister’s kids are here all the time. Especially in the summer. And my husband’s older sister’s girls have stayed with us many times when they go on adult only vacations.
I’m not as upset as my husband is about the conversation but we have made our decision, had our own personal experience and as painful as it is, children of our own is not the answer. We have moved on.
It is such an insult to the injury we’re all already having to endure when others don’t respect our privacy and our decisions. I am sorry someone in your lives, especially someone in your religious life who should have compassion and offer support, seem to question what you and your husband decided together. Love to you both-
What a horrible thing for that bishop to say. How dare he? Who does he think he is, being so hurtful and challenging someone’s faith like that! This is why I don’t like religion anymore because of things like this. God has nothing to do with it. It’s science. And why does the clergy feel like they have the right to comment on what goes on with your reproductive systems. Ugh!
The only thing I would say to that bishop is that it’s none of his business.
That is what my husband wants to say to him…it is none of his business. He was so pissed after that conversation.
4 years of trying and 5 years sense deciding to stop…and him having gone through infertility hell himself with his wife…and he said that….ugh!
I don’t care if he thinks there is a miracle….scientifically it is out of the realm of possibility.
I love your answer about how “there are children in our home…they just aren’t ours.” Beautiful.
I had a Bishop tell me once I should just be grateful I didn’t have cancer. I told him I was grateful I didn’t have it yet, as my mom and her sister both had breast and skin cancer. He had 8 kids, though, so he just didn’t get it. Now when people ask if I have kids in the home I just say, “only the invisible ones”. They’re usually so surprised they can’t think of anything to follow up with. 🙂
My experience is quite different. While I was married my husband didn’t want to have kids so I accepted his choice. Even though he remarried shortly after our divorce and sent me the picture and announcement of his newborn son. I couldn’t understand then, now I accept his choice.
What did hurt me was when we were still married and I showed up in the living room with a pillow under a dress, looking like pregnant. I was so pretty !!! My ex husband looked at me and screamed: take that out !
I was devastated. Something died inside me that day…
My husband isn’t doing well at all. Part of it is the childlessness, the other part is reconciling years of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of his own mother. The holidays are coming up, so it’s the beginning of the season of ‘How can you not visit your mom for Christmas, if you had kids you would understand!”. Like somehow if we had a child it would be easier to comprehend her behaviour or reconcile it.
I’m a few years ahead of him in the suffering with the childlessness, things are harder on women earlier, so it’s only now that he is approaching is forties that people are really getting out of line with the ‘have kids’ comments. I’ve been hearing them since I was in my early twenties….
For him I often think it’s difficult because half the men he talks to say they hate their wives and would never have had children if they could go back in time, but ‘they love their kids’. The other half drone on about how being a father is the best thing that ever happened to them and how he should leave me now if he really wants a family because there ‘is still time for him’. Women just bully me that my life is empty and I’m a garbage human for not joining the ‘Mommy club’. He gets the bullying to have kids and the bullying over being upset for wanting kids.
I feel for him, as I know there is nothing I can say or do to help him move on from that emotional place he’s stuck in. I know because I was stuck in it for a very long time.
He is also focusing a lot on his own behaviour towards me during my rough parts. He apologized the other day for always pressuring me to go to family events or have contact with the people who were really cruel to me over our childlessness. He just thought before I should ignore them, and that although he understood I was sad about their treatment of me, I just shouldn’t let them get to me. Now He understands that you can literally hide in a closet and not talk to people and they will be sliding pictures under the closet door asking when you’re going to come out and have a baby too.
At least I have this group. He has no one.
He has you and that’s a lot. My husband went through a delayed understanding too, sometimes I think it happens for them when we are emotionally able to help them through it.
Foxglove that is awful for you both to go through.
I have experienced many of the things you’ve mentioned you’ve gone through and the ones your husband is going through too.
It’s sad that we face the struggle of educating people on how to be compassionate to our situation.
Through doing just that I have heard many more people voice their disbelief that we have to do that and that had helped support me & get stronger & raise awareness how more education is needed on this subject.
I don’t know if you know but I had to put up a sign in my workplace explaining to my customers why them bullying me for being childless is unacceptable and why relentlessly & tactlessly questioning me on my plans to have children is deeply hurtful & intrusive.
It’s really crap that we have to do this, all that nastiness has stopped for me at work now thank God.
I hope it will stop for you too. It’s been an uphill battle.
I have not asked my husband about how he’s dealing with our childlessness since the last couple of years. We were just probably busy minding our financial and health problems to add this worry. But I get really hurt when people especially his fellow male who were fathers that he should try harder to get us pregnant. But I have always been telling him that we are more blessed than those assholes (sorry for the word) who can’t even buy their children decent clothes and food.