Children

I want to write about my feelings as they are now about having children and how that has changed over the decades and how my wife and I came to be in this situation. When we first met, as all couples should who decide to spend their entire lives together, my wife and I discussed our thoughts on having children. I had not even considered the idea at the time and after thinking about it decided to not have them since that was what I wanted. My wife, as I've mentioned before, was also of the mind that we were not going to have children.

  This went on for a long time, eventually in our 30s, I decided to have a vasectomy. There were a few reasons for this, we wanted to experience sex without the interference of condoms, the sheer cost of buying so many condoms, the still ever present chance of accidental pregnancy (which we did go through a scare a couple of times in our lives) and the fact that getting pregnant would be really bad for my wife's health. When I did this my wife asked me multiple times if I was sure and I was. She also offered to freeze some sperm in the off chance that I ever wanted to have children and I also refused that. Right up in to the point in the waiting room before I went to have the operation done she was asking me if I was sure. I always said I was and truthfully at the time I was.

  Over the years my wife has always told me that if I ever wanted children I should find someone to have them with. She has been very open with this offer, as long as I loved her and stayed with her and did not love or want the other person she would understand and support me. This is the wonderful woman my wife is. Heck, she even offered to let me sleep with someone else as long as it was only a physical thing and there was no emotional connection just so I could experience what that was like.

  It has only been very recently that I decided I wanted children, a few years ago I came to this realisation. I don't know how I came to this realisation but it was an incredibly scary thing to me. I really could not deal with it and hid this from my wife, denied that I felt like this to her and deluded myself that if I told her she would not understand. I know she does understand because I told her not too long ago.

  When I told her, which as a posted about early on in this blog, she was as supportive as anybody could hope. I wrote that she finally noticed me crying, finally was the wrong word to use and should not have been written. I did my damnedest to not let her see me crying since I knew she would do what she always does when I cry, try her hardest to comfort me which always makes me feel better and helps me cope with whatever is bothering me.

  When we talked out how I felt she offered all sorts of solutions to try and help me deal with this. She helped me talk through whether this was how I was actually feeling or whether is was just some kind of mid life crisis regret moment. There were several options we talked about. She told me we could try to get pregnant and have children despite the fact that it would be potentially fatal to her with her health. We also talked about the possibility of adopting, not a baby but a small child and how we should feel as connected to that child as we would be to someone who was born to us. We talked about the disruption and changes in our lives that would happen if we did have a child. We talked about everything we should have that I had been avoiding talking about all that time. We even talked about the possibility of doing some volunteer work with children just so we could try and bring some good in to the lives of children who need it.

  I am disgusted with myself that what is written here is the whole truth and I hid some of this from people reading this blog in order to make myself look better and my wife look worse. I really started this blog to be honest with and about myself and I allowed that not to be true. I didn't want this blog to be funny, interesting or anything that people would flock to in order to read. I simply wanted it to be somewhere I could write everything down, I am doing my best now to make it that place.