If anyone could offer me some advice on how to handle this situation, I would really appreciate it!
My husband and I have been happily married for 7 years. When we first got married, we agreed that we would wait about 2 years before trying to have a child. Two years came and went, and we discussed it and decided to wait 2 more years. You can see where this is headed. In the meantime, I've gone to graduate school, and we decided to wait until after I finished my MS- so last May I finished and we started trying to conceive a child. It ended up being a difficult year, as we suffered a series of early miscarriages. Each time we discovered I was pregnant, my husband expressed his excitement- and he was very supportive of me each time the pregnancy ended. We've since had a bunch of testing done and I had corrective surgery-- my doctor now feels fairly confident that we'll have no more trouble. My last miscarriage was in early April 2004, and we both were ready for some time to cool off and regroup. Now 5 months have gone by and I have gone through the unpleasantness of surgery and am starting to think about when we're going to start trying to conceive again. Whenever we discuss it, however, my husband goes back to telling me that he's not quite sure he's ready. All of his past reasoning is no longer applicable-- we have the money, we have the time, we even have family in town to help now that my parents have moved here. I don't know what to do! I feel like we've negotiated all this several times and come to agreements about how long to put it off-- but whenever we reach the time we had agreed upon, he changes his mind. It makes me feel like I've been agreeing to specific times ("okay, we'll wait one year and then start trying"), whereas he's only really been agreeing to "not now." He says that he definitely wants kids and that he knows we've made agreements and that he'll "go along with it" if I really want to start trying again now-- but this is a big deal and I want him to be excited about it, too! At the same time, I don't want to wait forever-- we're getting older! I think one problem might be that we live in a college town and our peer group is mainly made up of grad students (who are usually younger than us and not thinking about babies at all) or post-docs and faculty who put off starting their families until reaching their late 30s and 40s.
Please help. I love my husband dearly and want him to be enthusiastic about our decision, but I feel like every time we negotiate on this, he ends up going back on our agreement-- so I don't really trust that any new date we agree on in the future will be upheld.
