do you plan on being in the delivery room?

At this point, definitely NO. I also don't go to her dr appts with her. There are some things that I'm just not ready to do and she understands that. She has already arranged for a good friend of the family to be in the delivery room with her.

I think that is very wise.

RB:

As from your first post, your practical and analytical nature is evident. That and your genuine love of your family. I had a specific reason for dinging you.

First of all, I doubt that your wife is really able to understand the depth of the emotional trauma she inflicted on you. Yet I don't doubt that she really wants to understand and believes she does. Her burden is that she made the choices. And I suspect that the OM has proven to be a complete cretin has just piled on even more reason for what I want to suggest might be something to look for down the road for both of you.

Right now, the hormones in her body caused by pregnancy are probably acting to enable her to deal with the whole situation instead of sinking into complete depression. I mean the depths of dispair, as it were. I would be amazed if it were otherwise. I don't need to say why, because that would be stating the obvious.

AFTER the birth, she may find herself in post partum depression. AND, this can also affect you in unrelated ways. I say unrelated because PPD can hit men in slightly different ways.

PPD is serious. Here is a decent link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postpartum_depression

Over the years I have known three couples where PPD raised its ugly head after the birth of a child. Two were fairly mild and one led to suicide. You may want to ask your OB/GYN for a referral. PPD is tough to treat, but is treatable.

Yea, like you don't have enough on your plate right now

All the best.

Larry

rb,,, my w and i went thru these same emotions. she wanted to enjoy her preg the same as with our other 6 and yet she knew how much it hurt me and tried to keep it quite. she actually told everyone that she didn't deserve a baby shower.

casual friendships and their comments also hurt her. ex.. the grocery store checker saying things like "haven't you 2 figured out what causes that yet". i could see the hurt and pain in her eyes and there was nothing i could do about it.

i did go to some of her dr appoint and actually was in the delivery rm with her. that was the hardest thing i have ever done.

your w having someone else there will prove to be a wise decision.

from your posts about her attitude i think that she has completely separated this baby from om. to her it is mearly HER BABY. and by being HER child she associates that baby to being yours and hers since all her other children are yours also. even tho she knows the facts she may still feel this way.

since i loved the sight of her being preg with all our other kids after her tummy actualy popped seeing her didn't hurt me that bad.

i was like you and avoided the feeling the baby move part of her preg. now 7 yrs down the road i wish i had been able to do that a couple of times.

not so much for my w but on a more selffish level. since i have come to love grace so much i wish i could look her in the eyes and tell her that i touched her before she entered this world.

stay strong my good man. you are doing great

Larry,
Thanks for pointing that out. I hadn’t even thought about PPD because it has never been a problem before. But, this pregnancy is also not exactly like the other three.

Pops,
I struggle at times and fear that, even though it may be painful now, I will look back in 10 years and regret that I don't have these special memories with this child. I always felt like that by going to the Dr visits, being in the delivery room, and touching her belly while talking to the baby were times of bonding not just for me and my wife but for me and that child. I fear that I will one day regret not having those moments but I'm just not at a place to do those things right now.

Luckily, the next few weeks look extremely busy for me do I won't have much time to just dwell on all of this. We are helping DD19 move back into her apartment for college this weekend. School doesn't start until the following week but she's going on a final summer trip with some GF's and wanted to go ahead and get moved in early. She is living off campus this year in an apartment and her lease begins today. Apparently she's had all of the family time she can stand and can't wait to move out again. Just kidding but it's a little tough knowing that she needs her old dad just a little less each year. You work so hard to help them become adults and then wish they never had to grow up.

I hope you guys have a great weekend.

Just my 2 cents, but I was born "back in the day" when fathers weren't allowed in the delivery room and I know for certain that when I came along there was no time for "bonding" moments with my dad during my mom's pregnancy with me.

However, I was my dad's "princess" (thus my name) all of my life. We shared a very special and close relationship/bond until he passed away in 1984.

So don't feel bad about what you can't do right now. Yanno?

RB,

Don't worry about her needing you less. It doesn't happen. The "bank of Dad" is always on the list of high need. Actually, what you will see is that as she gets older, your IQ is going to start going up, and you will find she will seek you out for important discussions, which at 19 she would NEVER have.

Heck, my youngest is 21 and my IQ is at least room temperature now. ANd it is going up faster than global warming.

Princess, do you know what the definition of useless is?

It is a Father in a delivery room.

I am fairly old but had kids later in life. So I was there for all of the deliveries. It was a bit weird because frankly there was little I could do, or do as well as the trained folks actually doing something. I sort of feel I missed out pacing the waiting room smelling the cigar smoke...ya know the whole scene.

RB, take care. You are doing really well, even if it doesn't feel like it sometimes.

JL

I highly doubt your IQ is anywhere near room temperature.

What our society lacks and can learn from other cultures is respect and admiration (yes, I mean it) for older poeple. Their life experience and point of view are just something all young people can benefit and learn from. You're just one great example.

Ah, BA. Perception is reality.

For most people.

Yea, we don't have a culture that emphasises experience as learning. I point out to my oldest son that he knows more each year and he agrees, then that adults are older so he can expect that they know more than he does, and he gets this expression on his face that is priceless.

I too was older when my latest was born. My first kid was years ago and I was not in the delivery room. I saw my youngest born and that was a serious shock. My wife didn't want to be be held, just touched.

One of the funniest lines any comedian has ever told, was Bill Cosby's diatribe on child birth. He leads into his punch line with observatios of Lamaz and breathing and all the prelims, observing that she wanted natural birth, etc., etc. Then he says "The first pain hit and my wife stood straight up in the stirrups and told everyone in the room that my parents were not married."

I took pictures and touched my wife per request, gently. After my son was born, he was fussing on the warming table. I sang the song that I sang to him in the womb and he quieted and reached up to me. A nurse, caught up in the humanity of it all by evidence of her expression, gave me my son and I took him to my wife. My memories of that and my wife's own memories are probably, as much as anything, what held us together during that time three years ago when she went nuts.

Larry

You might not have THOSE special memories, RB.

There will be others, though....just as good, but different.

My grandmother used to say that she loved all her kids the same.

But how could she?

I DO NOT love all my kids the same. I love each one of them different because each one of them IS different, and unique, and wonderful...but DIFFERENT....goodness - could you imagine me having 5 like my OS8...holy bat-dooky! I'd be a mental patient for certain!

Part of dealing with this is the realization that the ideals you had - the future you had - will not be as you pictured it.

But the truth is, life changes. Our future as WE wanted it to be WAS NOT A PROMISE - it was not a gimmie set in stone.

And it hurts to realize that.

You can be sad about it, butcha gotta realize that it was never yours. It wasn't promised or already given to you, then snatched back...it just never was.

And the moment you comet to true grips with that will be the moment that you will realize that it's okay to make DIFFERENT memories with your wife and that baby.

How are things going with you, Runnerboy? Haven't seen an update in a while.

It’s been a couple of months since I last posted on this thread. I haven’t had much time to be online lately, but I stopped in to read a few posts today and thought that I would give everyone a short update.

We are continuing to work hard at recovery. My wife is still doing all of the things that she needs to do to make me feel good about my decision to stay. She is working hard at meeting my ENs and making her life as transparent as possible. She is about 6 months along in her pregnancy and she found out recently that this baby is a boy. I am able to engage in a little baby talk with her at this point, but there are still limits to what I can handle. I am still resolved to make this work, but I continue to have some apprehension about if I’ll really be able to bond with this child like I did with my 3 biological kids.

Speaking of the kids, the older 2 had b-days in late August so I guess I need to update my profile to show that they are now 20, 17, and 13. The oldest is a junior in college, the middle one is a senior in high school, and the youngest is a full fledged teenager. They all seem to be doing well with all of this and in fact they have seemed to accept this pregnancy better than I have. I think that my wife’s honesty with them from very early on during all of this has helped them forgive her and move forward.

My next big hurdle comes in a few weeks. It will be homecoming at my old university in a few weeks and we are scheduled to go and attend the yearly banquet they have for former players. It’s the only time that I see most of my old teammates. I am dreading the baby questions and the unavoidable jokes about having a baby at our age. I have already decided that there is no reason to tell them that this baby isn’t mine. But, it will still mean that I have to deal with the baby talk for an entire weekend and just smile politely the whole time. I thought for a while about either not going or going by myself, but the kids really look forward to this every year and I decided that I would just suck it up for one weekend.

Finally, I am in the process of selling most of my business. I have been developing commercial real estate for about 15 years and my business owns ( more like the bank owns ) a number of strip malls and apartment complexes. I am in the process of selling off enough of the properties to retire all of the debt. That will leave me with a couple of fairly profitable apartment complexes near a local college campus. Those will provide enough income for us to live comfortably and allow me to spend a lot less time at work and a lot more time at home. I finally realized that I was working 7 days a week building a business to pass down to my kids when they had no real interest in the business and would much prefer to have me more involved in their lives.

I’m sure I’ll be around more in the coming months seeking advice as this baby is born ( sometime near Christmas ). I am pleased with the progress we have made since May, but I still have occasional bouts of doubt and anger. I can see why everyone says that recovery takes several years, because just when I think we’ve arrived something will happen that triggers me and I question what I’m doing and fight to control the anger.

Kudos to your FWW for the progress she has made and the way she is earning your trust back. I know a BH on another board who is now dad to his W's OC. The OC was born over the summer. He bonded with the OC immediately. He too was afraid he wouldn't.
Keep in touch and be prepared to have some triggers over the weekend at your reunion.

Runnerboy,

As an OC, I would encourage you to sue the OM for child support or a large cash settlement, you never know what the future holds so please get the money for the child. Also this will make the OC less competition for you biological children for resources in the family.

My biological father got off the hook easy, although he supported his step-children through medical school.

I would also encourage adoption, I was adopted out of a family situation like yours and I think it was the best outcome all in all.

God Bless
NJ

PS Don't know how you cope with this, you are a superior person to myself I would have ****ed the OM.

Runnerboy, since you first came here you have been, and continue to be, my hero. Your strength is phenomenal and an inspiration to all. You will be a great dad to this baby. You will!

Hi RB,

Good to see you check in. I know things are rough but you seem to be handling them pretty well.

God Bless,

JL

I haven’t been around much in a few months. It had just gotten to the point where I would get really angry when I came on here and read about all the hurt being caused by WS’s. I decided I needed to just stay away for a while and focus on me and my family. I have been on several times lately and someone asked about an update on another thread yesterday so I thought I would bring everyone up to speed since you guys have helped me so much.

From a business standpoint, things have been going pretty well considering the state of the economy. I think I mentioned in my last update that I was drastically downsizing my business to free me to do other things. I have been able to do some of that but not as much as I would like. I have stopped the property development side of my business and I’m just focusing on managing the existing rental properties. I had planned to strategically sell off individual properties and pay off the debt associated with them and end up with only a couple of apartment complexes to manage with no debt. I have been able to sell about half of what I wanted to and maybe I can sell the rest when the economy picks back up. The good news is that with the housing market like it is my apartment units are fully rented and making money. This is so much better than it was a year ago. I already have more time to spend with my wife and kids. I only wish I had realized years ago where the true value in my life came from.

On the relation ship side, my wife and I have been doing really great. We worked our way through SAA and HNHN and made some big changes in how we relate to one another. Once aware of the LBs, we have both been able to greatly minimize if not eliminate most of them We have also been trying to do at least one thing every day for the other that is in line with our EN’s. We are spending more time together each week than we used to spend in several months. I do still trigger sometimes around baby issues, but I can usually keep it to myself until I can process it. She is due in 6 weeks now so I’m sure it will be a hard Christmas in many ways. We have decided to tell OM about the baby and offer him a deal that we won’t seek child support if he will relinquish his parental rights. We believe that he will do this without problem given his current situation

I have tried to not think about OM at all, but I did get one final update from his BW last month. Their divorce was to be finalized during the last week of October. She was able to file on the grounds of adultery, using the evidence she had gotten from his other GF’s husband. This sped up the waiting period. She was able to get custody of their kids and he is being made to pay a “generous” amount of child support. He is also still fighting the A of A lawsuit brought on by his other GF’s husband. I am trying to just stay out of all that, but I do smile occasionally thinking about him “getting what he deserves.” Since there were videos involved with his other OW, I have asked my wife if there was ever any videos or pictures taken in her affair. She assures me that there wasn’t to her knowledge and that almost all of their encounters were either in one of their cars or our rental property that it would have been almost impossible to get any pictures or videos w/o her knowledge. By the way, that rental property has long been sold and that car traded.

We are doing pretty well considering where we were 9 months ago. We have endued more than I could ever imagine was possible and our marriage is honestly better than it’s been in 10-15 years. I’ll try to be better about posting updates and I’ll be sure to let everyone know when the baby is born. I’m sure I’ll need some help processing all of that.

I am so glad you brought us up to date. I was wondering about how you are doing. Glad to hear the update.