randomuser1
New member
@davidlionheart My fourth wasn’t planned. Termination was never something I considered, but it took me and my husband a while to get used to the idea and be ok with it. I was just starting to feel better about it when I miscarried at 11/12 weeks. That was awful.
We ended up having another. He wasn’t planned but he wasn’t not planned either if that makes sense. He’s amazing.
It’s still hard, because if I hadn’t miscarried Jesse we wouldn’t have him, but I really didn’t want Jesse until maybe a week or so before he was gone. The feelings are complex.
The thing I come back to is my husband and I’d relationship. He was ready to be done having kids but I wasn’t. After we lost Jesse, he was still ready to be done having kids but he understood how much I did still want another and made his peace with one more.
From what you’ve written, I do think you’ll regret terminating. I think your husband will probably be very not actually ok with it and it’ll be hard on your relationship.
You mentioned not having any help. Maybe part of the conversation needs to be figuring out how to get you some help now. Maybe it’s a mother’s helper who comes for a few hours once or twice a week so you can keep doing some stuff for you? Or a child share, where you send your kids to play with another mom and her kids for a morning or an afternoon once a week and you take her kids for the same amount of time another day (it sounds counterintuitive, but two three year olds and two five year olds is actually easier to manage than one of each because they pair off and entertain each other.) Outsourcing chores — I do the day to day tidying and cooking etc, but we pay for a cleaner to come do the bathrooms and actual scrubbing of stuff. My house is a still a disaster half the time, but it takes a lot of pressure off knowing that it has been cleaned properly every other week.
I think it might take a few weeks or months to get used to the idea of a third, but it’ll be ok. Something that helped a lot when I was pregnant with Jesse was a friend who told me it was ok to not be immediately excited, and to be scared and overwhelmed and all the rest. It didn’t make me a bad mom. It just meant that was how I was feeling then. The nice thing about feelings is that given time, they change.
We ended up having another. He wasn’t planned but he wasn’t not planned either if that makes sense. He’s amazing.
It’s still hard, because if I hadn’t miscarried Jesse we wouldn’t have him, but I really didn’t want Jesse until maybe a week or so before he was gone. The feelings are complex.
The thing I come back to is my husband and I’d relationship. He was ready to be done having kids but I wasn’t. After we lost Jesse, he was still ready to be done having kids but he understood how much I did still want another and made his peace with one more.
From what you’ve written, I do think you’ll regret terminating. I think your husband will probably be very not actually ok with it and it’ll be hard on your relationship.
You mentioned not having any help. Maybe part of the conversation needs to be figuring out how to get you some help now. Maybe it’s a mother’s helper who comes for a few hours once or twice a week so you can keep doing some stuff for you? Or a child share, where you send your kids to play with another mom and her kids for a morning or an afternoon once a week and you take her kids for the same amount of time another day (it sounds counterintuitive, but two three year olds and two five year olds is actually easier to manage than one of each because they pair off and entertain each other.) Outsourcing chores — I do the day to day tidying and cooking etc, but we pay for a cleaner to come do the bathrooms and actual scrubbing of stuff. My house is a still a disaster half the time, but it takes a lot of pressure off knowing that it has been cleaned properly every other week.
I think it might take a few weeks or months to get used to the idea of a third, but it’ll be ok. Something that helped a lot when I was pregnant with Jesse was a friend who told me it was ok to not be immediately excited, and to be scared and overwhelmed and all the rest. It didn’t make me a bad mom. It just meant that was how I was feeling then. The nice thing about feelings is that given time, they change.