Thank you anita. My wife and I just recently sat down and I told her all about what I was feeling. She had said a few weeks back that she was afraid to try again, that she had tried to get me to change and I had written her feelings off, so now she is afraid that if she stays, she will grow to resent me and she wants to walk away while we still have love for one another.

I told her that when she lost the baby, I blamed myself, and that blame then turned into self loathing, and that self loathing turned into an anger so fierce that it pushed everyone away from me. I told her I felt like it was my psyche’s way of punishing me for my perceived sin, and that the desired effect was not to treat her and the children badly, rather to make me miserable and lose me a family I felt I didn’t deserve.  Her answer gave me a bit of pause, but it did help. She said “It’s not ALL your fault, I could have stayed down and rested. We didn’t know that would happen”. She reminded me that even our next daughter only had a 30% chance of survival. Turns out that abruption had more to do with the scar tissue in her uterus from her C Section birth of our first child. It didn’t allow the placenta to attach as firmly as it normally would. It was a one in a million shot that unless I was keenly aware of her medical issues inside and out, I could have never predicted. The doctor for our next daughter even said he wouldn’t have known unless we had alerted him to what had happened with Maya.

It gave me pause at first because of the word “all”. As though “some” might have been. Although with what she said after, it was clear she didn’t ever blame me. It was all just something I created. But that one event rippled out through our entire relationship like a stone cast into a still pond. As I said, I am looking to see a physician to deal with some of this chemically (I have tried for a decade to handle this alone, I have failed) and probably see a counselor.

My issue is now the distance that is between us. I get it, I hurt her. She says she’s “not in love with me anymore”, but that doesn’t ring true to me. I believe she may not feel it anymore, and I don’t want to discount her feelings, but anyone who is going through this level of distancing from another person tells me that they still are very much in love, but they are terrified if they let the other person back in and they fail to make real change happen that she will start to hate me. She barely speaks to me anymore. She won’t be physically intimate with me, not sex or kissing. She barely even says I love you. She only does so when the kids are around as to not rouse suspicion for them (we are keeping all of this under wraps until we know for certain what is happening). I feel exposed without her there to help me out. I know there is a way through the walls she has erected around her heart. And I know why those walls exist. But she says she just feels nothing. For anyone.

Part of me thinks this might be a PTSD response that she used when her abusive father would do his nastiness. Emotional numbness, the call it. I wonder if this is how she coped back then, and she just slid back into it out of habit. I just don’t know how to reconnect. I feel like I am sitting outside the walls of Ft Knox with a truck full of dynamite, but no possible idea where to put it all to make the walls come down. And it makes me very worried for my family. Add to that, the stress of digging around inside of one’s own head to find out why I had changed, and it has been a very stressful 2 weeks.

I appreciate your input, however. Truly.