I posted on the TTC board about my compulsive/obsessional worry about the what ifs that led up to my situation and you guys were so welcoming, I thought I'd post again.

I am not technically a baby loss person. I have living children, but they were born after years of infertility and recurrent miscarriage syndrome (6 losses after 14 weeks of gestation for each). It robbed me of 5 years of my life. My children were miracles and are only 13 months apart. Both had traumatic births and were admitted to the NICU for several days due to respiratory issues.

Anyway, my husband didn't want to have kids. When I brought it up when we first got married and before, he shunned the topic and said we weren't ready, we needed more money, I needed to be happier in my job (I was a lawyer - not possible). He loved his job, and enabled me to stay in a pretty toxic job. He didn't make me or anything - I am not trying to cop out, but he encouraged it and enabled it and lived the lifestyle that my salary brought. So, I didn't take a career opportunity in another profession that would have required a move that I had been working towards for years. It paid less and was in an undesirable location. I thought that it would disrupt things and he would not want to TTC. I took another legal job in another state that he wanted to live in and had to take the bar again. My salary was obscene but so was my health. That is what started the infertility nightmare.

I didn't feel like he was really trying. He was very sexual before and started making excuses during ovulation period. After about 6 months of no success, he told me that he did not want to have kids. He has a very good reason for this - he has MS. He is asymptomatic and has been for several years. However, we discussed kids specifically when we got married and I told him how I felt. I wasn't going to stop living over it. But he didn't want to try anymore or go to a fertility specialist. So, I fought my body and him until I was able to get pregnant and had a miscarriage, then he fell in love with being a daddy.

Now, I am alot older than I wanted to be (going into mid 30s), he is alot older (hitting 40 soon), and I am traumatized emotionally and physically to the point that I can't enjoy these blessings in my life. I have been diagnosed with post partum depression and OCD and PTSD. I am not doing well, and I can barely stand to be near my husband. He wants to have a normal relationship with me, but I just don't know how. We were so focused on making a baby for so long and I just suppressed all of my anger at his role in causing it and after they got here, It all came spilling out.

There is a part of me that doesn't want to save my marriage or I would like to sleep in a different room and just have a platonic relationship with him for many months. There is also a part of me that hates him. I met him when I was very young, and this should just not have happened.

Does anyone know what I am talking about? I am hoping someone does somewhere...because I am going crazy.

Hi Jen: First off, I just want to say that you have no need to apologize or think that you are "not a baby loss person." Yes, there are difference between losing a child at 14 weeks versus later but, having suffered several second trimester losses, you belong here as much as the rest of us.

That being said, I am going to throw the old "have you considered seeing a marriage counselor?" line out there. Even when both partners are supportive, fertility issues and pregnancy loss can put an enormous strain on a relationship. It is understandable that you would have some anger, but it would probably benefit both of you to dig deeper to find the source of the anger. I am just throwing this out there but, when one suffers baby loss, there is so much anger that comes from the whole "why me?? why my child??" of it that it natural to want to find a tangible target to vent all of the anger towards. Even if your husband isn't open to therapy, some individual therapy would be helpful to you, I'm sure. The anger can't be good for your living kids to be around, right?

Good luck.

I think that Sarah talks a lot of sense.
I know it's really, really helped me to talk to someone.

I don't blame you for being angry at him. I think that talking to someone else who is calm and uninvolved might really help you both (even if he isn't will to get involved at first).

I'm so sorry things are so hard for you.

I get it, and I'm in a similar place. We lost our daughter a couple of years ago, and we have a living 6-month old son and I have been so, so angry with my husband. There are numerous factors involved, and it's pretty complicated, but I know what you're saying when you say that you're going crazy.

We've been to a therapist (we were going to him previous to our daughter's death), and I just don't feel like it's helping. We probably need to see someone else, but I feel like it will take a very long time for any counselor to understand the extent of our situation and be able to provide the type of support we need.

So, I guess I don't have a whole lot to offer you, except to say that I'm in a very similar place, and I understand the anger and rage. And I'm so sorry.

Thank you guys for your thoughts. It means alot. Unfortunately, we live in a rural area. I finally made a career change that has put me in a position that I enjoy but a place that kind of sucks for a while. We will probably be here for another 2 years, but there are actually no marriage counselors in this town and we live 1.5 hours from a larger town and I just cant' swing that, so I am not sure what we are going to do. Maybe I could find a therapist that could try to do therapy with us.

The only thing that is helping me right now is to tell him I can't deal with things and to sleep in another room. I get so angry with him when I am near him that I just go to pieces. If I don't see him as much, it helps. I do love him and tell him that and hug him, but I just can't deal with intimacy or spending time with him that would ordinarly feel like "bonding" time. He is an incredible dad - he works at home and is the primary caregiver...the irony of it all. I guess sex just makes me mad right off the bat. I want to say - "where were you when this mattered?" and infertility kind of makes you feel like your sexual relationship is subpar anyway - I mean, if it was good, wouldn't you have gotten pregnant sooner is what I say to myself. I blamed myself over infertility, but after years of problems and testing my RE said - no joke - "seriously, are you guys doing it enough during your fertile period" and I burst into tears because we weren't and I couldn't get him too. For years this went on. He regrets it just as badly because he realizes that he may have inadvertently caused me pain. He kind of felt like he was doing what was best for us because of his MS, but in the process all of his fears came true. He was worried about kids ruining our relationship. They didn't. He and his fears did. He deceived me on a subject that has leveled me.

I would have never believed that living children wouldn't erase this pain, but It's that innocence that you lose and you will never get back. Things weren't supposed to be this way. I still see people get pregnant easy, and you can always tell, they are worried about stretch marks and getting fat and have amnios and CVS and matter of factly say that they want to know so they can deal with it. Good grief. People ask me why my husband and I waited until our 30s to have kids although we were together for over a decade from college and I just point to him now and say, "ask him." People assume that we "waited" to have children. It breaks my heart. I don't remember the last 6 years of my life except alot of pain with shining lights of joy--my kids.

Dear Jen,

My bit of background is this (just to put it in perspective as to what or how i understand) - i have 4 girls, all conceived easily and joyfully for both of us.) I knew i wanted more. My dh didn't. I got pregnant by accident at the very worst possible time, with one very young and no money, no house (between renting and buying) and a business that was growing fast with no time to put into it. Very much against my wishes, but with the children at the centre of the decision, we didn't continue with it. I fell apart and hated, hated, hated, my dh for what had happened. Our marriage fell apart, everything fell apart, i was in a deep depression, full of anger at him, myself, my body, my everything. I couldn't even see what i had. We went to counselling and by a miracle, we found common ground. We had another baby 4 years after the last pregnancy following 9 months of ttc. He died 11 days after birth :(

I completely, utterly totally understand how you feel. I know that black hole. I know how hard it is to see what you have when you are in it. I know the guilt in knowing you should be happy for what you have but somehow not being able to enjoy it. I know the confusion in that. And i sympathise massively and hugely with it. And i know how little my dh understood because from his point of view, we had everything and he'd given me everything i could have asked for.

Looking at all that now, from the confusion of those times, the awful dreadfulness of knowing our marriage and our family were falling apart and everything that has changed now with the dreadful loss of our little boy, i know, honestly, we both needed to do a lot of things to fix it. The counselling was amazing but i never believed he would go. He loved me - and he loved us - so he did. I didn't think it would work but it did. It helped him to see he needed to say sorry. I needed him to say sorry. I needed him to take some blame and accept some responsibility. And i needed to see, and i didn't for a long, long time, that i was deliberately hurting him to give myself someone, anyone to be angry at. I was angry with him for taking away the support i needed, i was angry with him for our choice, i was angry for wasted years and i was angry that i couldn't force him to do things my way. I was just so, so angry but it didn't need to be at him, i just trusted him to keep taking it. And eventually, i had to face up to the fact that he might go away if i continued. More than anything, i wanted to see him hurt as badly as i was doing - and i just couldn't see through the fog that he was hurting, he just didn't process grief and pain like i did.

I couldn't say that i'd experienced infertility but i got a taste in those 9 months of ttc as i never had to do that with the girls - and it clearly isn't going to be easy peasy now either. I wouldn't presume to know that pain - but if it is anything like the awful trauma that we went through in such different circumstances, i can imagine it producing that rage.

All i can say is, and i know it is very brutal so please read it with love and the hope that you will get forwards - you might be seeing the world through fractured glass right now. I know i was. I thought i was seeing the real picture and i just wasn't. I didn't really see that until i was sitting at Freddie's bedside waiting for him to die. I thought i was in full possession of my feelings and they were all clear and straight in the dark days of our marriage mess - and i just wasn't. I needed help; pills, counselling and therapy to get myself upright again. He needed it too because he was failing to hear beyond his own perspective. But it did work - we are so strong now, even with the death of our son.

If this rings any bells, and i hope it doesn't make you want to kill me, please take a look at talking. If you can't get to a counsellor, you might perhaps be able to make one another face the elephant in the room and force yourselves to talk. Find a night a week when you make yourselves argue it out. Really tell him you are feeling how you feel. It is unbelievably painful but i think that out loud, even at it's most bitter, is better than swishing painfully around in your head

You are a "babyloss" person. My baby that stopped growing at 7 weeks and miscarried at 13 weeks along just about when I was becoming aware that there was someone there was still a baby. So were yours.

And yes, I am not sure I should say I know "exactly" what you're talking about but I have a pretty good idea. It is so hard to talk to each other again. Really hard. And if your natural reaction to pain is anger, it can get pretty tough pretty quick. That lasts a while.

It's not weakness to ask someone for help. In some ways it takes an incredible amount of strength to face the possibility that help is what you need. Sometimes that third person stepping in and saying "Wait, are you hearing what your spouse is saying or are you just hearing the words coming out of his/her mouth?" helps. However, it is terribly frightening and there are a lot of excuses you can both find to avoid facing that.

If you can both get on the same page, it's hard, but even when you feel completely alone, you're not. It's just that a lot of people are very uncomfortable talking about death in general, let alone infants dying, and that translates to...silence and isolation.