Hi PJ,

I am so sorry about the miscarriage and stillbirth. Having been through it, it really does a number on the family. Grief is a funny thing and everyone goes through it differently. Your wife is not “over it”, she is processing it in a certain way.

It would be best to stay married to your wife until your youngest goes to college.

You really don’t want to blow up everyone’s life by divorcing in the middle of child raising. If this other woman is  a forever person, she will still be there several years from now.

Best,

Inky

Dear PJ:

To understand better, I ask:

You’ve been in a relationship with a woman from the age of 24 to 28 before you married her. How were those four years “in terms of physical intimacy, emotional connection and communication”?

anita

Dear PJ:

You are welcome.

Your wife is “a good person and generous person, great mother ..and an extremely hard worker at home and her job”-

– you shouldn’t have betrayed a good and generous person” day in and day out, week after week for six whole months.

I know you don’t want to feel guilty, but before discarding it listen to the message behind it: you betrayed a good, generous woman, a good mother to your own two children, so you said.

“The years of dating my wife in my book were just ok”, but your lover of six months, who is someone else’s wife and a mother to two children of her own, she was way better than okay, “never felt so close to someone, not even in my prior romantic relationships or my marriage”.

The reason you married your wife is because “no one else came along to make me question my decision”. But now someone did come along to question your decision.

As painful as it is for you and your wife to have lost this baby, it is not what kept you in the affair. What kept you in the affair is that you met a woman who was way better than okay, and now, okay is not good enough.

I suggest that before another pregnancy happens in your marriage, that a separation takes place. Co parent your two children as a team. If she is the great mother you say she is, she will do her best to co parent her children with you.

It may be a good idea for you and your wife to attend couple counseling not for the purpose of continuing the marriage but for the purpose of proceeding to co parent your children and protect your children from any and all possible expressions of hostility between their parents.

It is not divorce in itself that hurts children so much- it is the hostility involved. Take that factor away, and a divorce seems to me like the right step ahead, for you, for your wife and for your children.

anita

Hi PJ,

As you’ve found out, you cannot change someone else, in this case your wife.  The only person you can change is you.  We’ve established that there were always elements in your relationship that were lacking and it is up to you to decide whether or not you can continue living as a couple knowing that fundamentally as things stand you are not suited.  Your wife sounds as if she has some valuable qualities that you respect and this, no doubt, makes it difficult for you to leave.

With regard to the physical aspect of your marriage, I suggest that you broach this subject with your wife with the intention of seeking professional help with a sex therapist.  There’s a reason why the intimacy is lacking in your marriage and any  psychological aspects pertaining to this should be explored.  If she values you as a husband and she realizes how important this is to you, then she should agree to this.  Once this physical block has been released, you might find that the emotional connection happens of its own accord.

With regard to your children, they will handle the loss of your baby according to how you and your wife handle it.  They will take the cue from you.  As long as they know that it’s OK to feel sad, that people meet with disappointments along the way but life goes on and we all have to make the best of it, then you’ll have gone a long way towards ‘fixing’ them.  Nothing can take the experience away.  Leave the door open for them to discuss it if they want to.  I don’t know if you have a garden, but perhaps you could create a memory space for this lost child.  It doesn’t need to be much.  Just enough to contain a small plant or flowering bush, a few pebbles or polished stones, a place for a candle to be lit.

I hope you can work through this.

Peggy

Dear PJ:

I don’t know if you still intend to reply to Valora- but her post is very worthy of reading and re-reading, insightful, thoughtful, thorough. Valora wrote about your wife: “she had to handle (stillbirth) in whatever way she needed to handle that, even if that meant her pretending like it didn’t happen.. the only way she could function… she wasn’t there for you, walking beside you in your darkest moments….it’s likely she was going through something darker“.

– “the only way she could function”, is to be that “great mother.. and an extremely hard worker at home and her job“- that you wrote about your wife.

If she fell into depression following the loss of the baby, her two living children would suffer a lot, and she wouldn’t be able to work at home and outside, keeping a well maintained home for you as well as bringing in money.

Maybe she thought you will feel better if you saw her feeling better and functioning well- maybe she thought moving on was going to help you too.

Let’s look at this: a great mother, an extremely hard worker at home and at her job- that is a lot to be thankful for in a wife, isn’t it?

While your wife was parenting your children so well, keeping the house clean, cooking, earning a paycheck, another woman who also has a husband, a home and two children is busy- not parenting her children, not keeping her home but adding some fun into her work day by having sex with .. you. She gets a lot of credit, this other woman, in your mind. She gets that credit because she is ‘hot’, sexual, makes you feel sexually/ emotionally wonderful.

That sexual/ emotional good experience is why you had the six months affair.

I don’t think your wife is aware of this sentiment of yours:  “The years of dating my wife in my book were just ok”, and that after marrying her, she got to be even less than just-ok in your book.

She doesn’t know. Or maybe she does. What if she knows it but.. pretends she doesn’t, because pretending is how she keeps functioning well?

anita

Dear PJ:

Well, seems to me that my earlier suggestion is a good one- that you and your wife attend quality couple counseling, not for the purpose of remaining marriage but for the purpose of ending the marriage in the best way possible, so the kids don’t get hurt unnecessarily.

Within such counseling, with the mediating of an effective counselor or therapist, the two of you will learn how to proceed with a separation and divorce in the most peaceful way  possible, expressing no hostility toward each other in the presence of the children, co-parenting in an organized, efficient way.

(for this purpose better she doesn’t know about the affair, no reason to reveal that, nor is there a reason to reveal your frustrations with her, it being just-ok with her and so  on).

I think the children will be in a better situation having two separated parents who get along very well (no aggression whatsoever) than with a mother who doesn’t seem to know the nature of her marriage, who plans on getting pregnant with you yet again, and a father who is frustrated and so unhappy in the marriage.

The love you want from a woman- find it elsewhere as a separated and divorced man. That way you betray no one- and no guilt.

anita

Dear PJ:

You are welcome. I understand, I think, how difficult it is for you now. Like I wrote, kids suffer most from aggression. In addition to no aggression, they need to be seen and heard, most important. So many children suffer from being invisible to their parents, they suffer in homes where their parents are married.

See them, listen to them, make sure they don’t observe aggression between their parents (or aggression turned against them)- and you will be doing an excellent job as a father, or continue to do an excellent job as a father.

anita