Childrearing Is Freaking Exhausting...

I understand the exhaustion. My ex and I had three children together. I used to get angry at my children for "taking" my wife away from me. But children ARE helpless and do need constant care and attention. When we didn't make the time to be intimate with each other, my wife and I drifted apart. After 10 years of that, our marriage died. Now I am alone, a little scared and both regretful angry at what happened. I hope she isn't scared and alone also... the children would sense that and might become insecure. You are in my prayers Zsus.
C

Today I just have to address the title of the story. Yes, child rearing is exhausting. What nobody tells you, before you have a child, is that it is actually ten times harder to take care of children than it is to work in an office and deal with corporate demands all day.

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Me
"There are pedophiles, murderers, thieves, drug addicts, psychopaths, sociopaths."
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If I might offer a tidbit, as a tourist among those with fringe sexual attitudes (I have an open marriage, for which the catalyst was originally an intimacy averse marriage) --- it's that I doubt you really wanted to meet people like that BEFORE you were married, and I don't think it's really any different now.

I've found in my post-marriage dating life, that I've met a number of absolutely wonderful people, and I have learned a tremendous amount about myself (and relearned some things), in the process. And that's within circles that most people think might be a bit sketchy, at least if staring in the window from the outside.

You aren't as young and naive now, and can likely set better boundaries. I think that much of our negative experiences with tolerating low quality relationships and partners comes initially from youth and inexperience.

There are people who careen within a series of awful relationships, never learning a lesson. They end up marrying 3 husbands who beat them, and don't understand that the common denominator is them and their choice in partner. You, Zsuz, don't strike me as one of those.

To your other point, Zsuz, about feeling jealous of the kids, there was a point where I felt not only jealous of the kids but also Of the cat. I see you have had the epiphany that I did, in moving over because he was tired and you, last on the priority list. With me, it was when I said, "Hey wait a minute, I'm a parent in this relationship and working full time, and keeping house, and I'M TIRED AND STRESSED TOO!!!" I'd never flipped it like that.

And that was the point where I realized that the kids, the cat, the jobs, the social life, the crazies, and all that stuff was being used, deliberately (though perhaps subconsciously) as chaffe to obfuscate the issue, which was the refusal to engage with me intimately.

OKay I read it all and I get you, I went through that same thought process too.
You are at risk of encountering all those freaks as much as you are at risk of finding a true awesome guy.
Do your thing away from the home, and the kids, you are not shopping for a daddy, you are looking for love, and having fear is good so you don;t go giving it for free to just anyone, but don't let it scare you from giving people a change, you might scare away a really good guy.
Just go with it, you've done so good up to now.

I have to read this later and again, with longER stories I lose the myself, but from the little I read so far, our stories are so alike it's scary.
Chin up butter cup.
Help me plan a Canada meet up and you'll feel better and busy your self LOL

Reading this story reminds me of how my husband was afraid to have sex with me when I was pregnant. He said "I do not want to hit the baby on the head". He must have slept through the anatomy part of biology class. :-)

I relate to this on a bunch of levels.

First of all - as I have reached my early 40s my sex drive has gone through the roof, and from what I have read that is pretty standard. You deserve sex, and it is totally reasonable to expect it.

Second - you touch on one of the many cruel truths of motherhood - a woman may have a child in the hope of creating more love, and may find that her partner abandons her in favor of the child. This has happened to me more times than I can count! I mean I have been figuratively abandoned by the same man over the same two kids. My husband loves our children much more than he loves me. Sad but true, and I guess it kind of makes sense too. It is hard not to resent the kids sometimes.

I hear your frustrations. I think you hold some very valid emotions and thoughts but some of it is also just fear leading you. The world is not full of all those bad people you speak of....more good than not. When you have been worn down of all that trust, when you expose yourself so deeply...all your emotions, all your being and you are rejected....not once, not twice but abusively....repeatedly...then how you feel RIGHT NOW makes perfect sense. He broke you. You need to find your inner strength and rise from this. Then you will be able to trust again.

I am a man, but have the same experience. Married 41 years....when we had sex, it wasnt that great...she was always very victorian in her sexual attitudes, but we havent had sex in7 years. I am commited to our marriage...we are friends, but not lovers. But I am about to climb the walls. I not it is not much help...but you are not alone....there are many of us, male and female, who crave the wonderfulness of intimacy, closeness, passion, and earth shattering sex. Life is so imperfect. Hang in there though!

Ouch, that sucks.

Our misery unifies us more strongly than our genders divide us. That being said, please remember that for each stereotyping of women as "baby-hunting asexuals", there are a thousand cases of stereotyping men as "horndogs thinking with their smaller head". Generalizations are usually wrong. Stereotyping is efficient information processing, but hurtful to a minority, or it won't be a stereotype.

zsu, i feel your anger and pain & frustration. as baz & hl & others have said, you're processing a LOT right now and the brain just.won't.stop.churning. been there!in this case, i think the safe advice is: blog. vent. but don't believe that your late night worst case scenario imaginings will come to pass. it won't all be hearts, roses, rainbows & butterflies. but i see you as smart, aware, savvy...and you, and your kids, will be fine. just fine. as Lao is fond of saying: breathe. and take the next breath. and take the next step.j

Being mad (angry mad) can generate useful energy when it's harnessed, I've found. Not as a specific guide to action (it's obviously a poor guide in the sense it's almost intentionally one-sided & extreme) - but as a generator and a focus for doing what you need to do.

My feeling is that we are actually well equipped to sniff out the dodgy, and so are our kids, especially when they've got the confidence and skills to manage themselves. What I do not trust is the toxic message from the state that they can safeguard our kids - that's snake oil and untrue.

Our trust in ourselves naturally takes a beating from the SM, yet possibly we are in a better position to identify the creeps because we are more in tune now to warning signs than if we had been in a good relationship where trust was there and there was no need for defence and vigilance.

Perhaps you've developed hypervigilence in the wee hours?

why would you put your child last? That is horrible!

Sister Zsu the word sexually abandoned describes most here so well. Dysfunctional relationships can often keep you up at night stewing at the rest of the world and our so called partners.

I know all to well about this. I have been kept up quite a few nights in the past stewing on how i ended up in my situation and what i was going to do about it.

I found the only thing you could do was get up put on a brave face and keep on going every day.

Stay Strong & Good Luck

Dysfunctional marriages **** with your head, get you thinking weird ****, get you making uninformed choices that feed back into the dysfunctional loop.

An example of this might be taking a position where you think that the world is populated by - "predators, pedophiles, murderers, thieves, drug addicts, psychopaths, sociopaths"

A further example might be taking a position where you don't trust your own intuition and smarts to spot these types, despite the years of practice your dysfunctional marriage has bestowed upon you in tuning your bullshit antenna.

Good news is, that once you bust out of the dysfunctional loop, your thinking does return to 'normal' pretty quickly. In fact it gets to "better than normal" by virtue of the trial by fire your dysfunctional marriage subjected you to.

Tread your own path.

So sorry. I think it's wonderful you got so spitting mad though. You do realize that you were venting and when you vent you are processing and maybe you won't see the results of that today or this week, but sometime you will see it was time well spent. It's all part of the path out. Don't beat yourself up about your temporary focus on yourself or your temporary resentment of your baby. You're a kick-*** mom now, and now is all you have and all that matters. And don't focus on future sexual partners/lovers/boyfriends in a negative way. When the time comes, you will know how to deal with the situation because you are obviously acutely aware of your status as the protector of your kids. Hope your tonight is more peaceful.

The guy I'm seeing isn't letting me around his kids, I find that perfectly appropriate.



Does make getting together to fool around even harder.

Next weekend we have tentative plans to split the cost of a motel room near where he lives, he gets a 'sitter, and....:D

...Provided he doesn't get called in for work due to emergency...>_<



Hon, you are not a freak. I am a freak, and happy to be one most of the time. I can therefore say with some authority you are probably not one.

Let your "perfectly normal" flag fly, darlin.'



...That whole "Women don't really like sex" thing is SOOO 1800's.

Hon, you really shouldn't let anonymous internet people make you so angry that it keeps you awake at night.

Wow. It sounds terrible. I am in a sexless marriage myself and I know how that is. I don't have kids but I know I would be feeling the same way as you if I were in your situation. I find those emotions natural, it could happen to anyone.

My husband thinks sex is not important and that's that. I love him, but I couldn't continue without sex. He gave me permission to find a lover, which I have and just took advantage of after a whole year of no sex. I am finally happy! Damn, what having sex does to a person. It helps in everything.

I can understand you and I hope you see the light at the end of the tunnel. If anything you can message me and I could lend an "ear".

Zsu,

I am right there with you. I also was up all last night pissed as hell. ****, I wrote on this website all night! My husband would have nothing to do with me. I am a little older than you but seriously he would rather go mow his parents grass than make love to me when we were younger. And I stuck around for this crap. I waited a long time for what I believed was a good man. I never screwed around because I thought this would be something special between my husband and myself. Bullshit to that! When I was pregnant with his children he would not even touch my stomach. Actually got mad at me because I had morning sickness. BUT I have left this sad guy behind. Far behind. He will not even speak to me because he does not want to sleep with me but does not want me to sleep with anyone else either. I begged him to read my posts on this site for a year and he refused. Now that I am gone he went to a counselor and she told him "its all my fault!"