Well, it's been a roller coaster ride - that's my opening understatement. I'm almost ashamed to post any of this, but I guess if I'm ever to post here again, one would have to know this info, so here goes.
S. has had a really rough time of coming to grips with our having a baby. His behavior has ranged from ecstatic to downright horrifying, with meltdowns on my bathroom floor, kicking furniture, and other nasty behavior. Mind you, he hasn't frightened me or has not threatened me in any way, and has all along said he would be here and take an active role in the baby's life, meaning, try to raise it with me.
The problem is, right before I found out I was pregnant, I had never been closer to leaving him. We had not spoken for three days because of something STUPID he did - he ran into an old GF two weeks earlier and made a date to see her without telling me, then when he did tell me, the day before he was to meet her, he lied about who she was (he said she was someone he used to work with at the food coop, and completely forgot he had told me all about her years ago). When I questioned him, he lied before finally coming clean. I didn't think he wanted to start something up with her, as she is with someone, too, but to lie to me after all these trust issues was a stupid mistake on his part. The reason we didn't speak for three days was because I knew if I spoke to him I would leave him, and I wanted to make sure I'd thought it through before I made a rash decision. Well, then I took a pregnancy test while on my way to Texas for 10 days, and the rest is history.
Here is the part I am ashamed to post about. S. asked me to consider terminating the pregnancy. He felt that we shouldn't be bringing a child into such a dysfunctional relationship, and said for all intents and purposes, before we found out about the baby, our R was over. In my state of panic over the shock of the pregnancy, over the horrendous state of our R, over his reaction, and over the potential of having to go it alone, I considered it. For about a total of 15 minutes. I have to give H2H a shout out here, because if it weren't for her coaching, I would never have made it through all the horrible talks with S. She was available to me day and night, through copious amounts of lamentation, hundreds of e-mails, including a detailed blow-by-blow of our talks that would have made a lesser friend overheat and walk away. Thank you, H2H, again, for being there (and remaining there) for me. I don't know how in the world I'd have gotten through it without your help.
The most difficult thing was that Dr. Jekyll would one day be affectionate and warm, excited about becoming a father, and the next, Mr. Hyde would come out and have a meltdown or tell me about his feelings, which were deeply hurtful to me.
Now, things are better. Mr. Hyde has faded into the background, and I'm enjoying a better R with Dr. Jekyll. I am more sensitive to S's feelings when he wants to talk about them, and I try to listen without personalizing them (an enormous feat - it's the hardest thing I've ever had to do). S. is truly thrilled to become a father, and we are slowly getting our issues on the table so that we can make a happy family for our child. At his insistence (not that I argued), we are in therapy once a week, and it is going well. And we are planning our garden in vermont, renovating his house here so we can move in over the summer, and otherwise enjoying a partnership that has eluded us to now.
In happier news, all my tests have been positive, and we've confirmed that it's a baby girl! I am due to deliver in late October, and so we are looking forward to our little Chilean surprise around the 20th or so. S. comes to all my appointments, and we've thrilled at the sight of our baby on the sonograms, and just the other day we heard her hearbeat. What a miracle. I feel fantastic, and have had no symptoms whatsoever (no nausea, no throwing up, no nothing). I feel strong and healthy, and went on my yoga retreat in Florida a few weeks ago, which was great. We leave for vermont tomorrow morning to prepare the garden for planting.
I guess as I go forward I'm going to need a lot of help getting through the very delicate labyrinth of S's feelings - his feelings of powerlessness, feeling trapped, that his life is changing in a way he hadn't wanted (he wanted to have a happy M first, which, of course I did too)... I am trying to be kind to him and still take care of myself. I'm hoping he can eventually see his way to taking care of me, too.
