This is a name-change, for obvious reasons!
Context: I have a funny relationship with my ex. We met 16 years ago and split up three years later, just before I found out I was pregnant with our son. It was an amicable enough split, just in different places with our lives (and age gap was a problem). But we have stayed amicable, to the extent that he has a key to my house and we are very much raising our disabled son together, as he needs us both to be consistent. He comes to our house and doesn't have our son at his, and we go on holiday together BUT we don't live together and definitely aren't together.
However, we slept together on holiday last year and it continued happening when we got back. I ended up pregnant, and didn't tell him, while I decided what to do. I was very confused about the pregnancy and only told a couple of close friends. I eventually decided to go ahead with it and had started to get excited, despite all the many reasons why it would make life difficult, and was due to tell ex over the Christmas holidays, but had a miscarriage before I did so.
I am (obviously) in a funny place after the miscarriage and have gone from thinking being pregnant was mostly difficult and complicated to wishing I still was. I had got myself in a positive place about it and to miscarry was pretty shattering.
I don't want to properly get back with my ex, and I don't know if I'm able to think about meeting someone different, for complicated reasons that I won't bore anyone with, mainly to do with my son's acceptance of new people in my life. However, I am pretty convinced now that I do want another child. I don't think my ex would want another child, and I don't intend to 'get pregnant accidentally', so I am thinking about options.
My best friend is a gay man. We used to joke about having a baby together if I didn't meet anyone by my mid-30s, but it was just jokes. He is the closest person to me apart from family, and we are very similar in many ways. When I told him I was pregnant, I could tell he was struggling with it a bit; he kept joking about how people would think it was his (which is possibly true - some people do think we're a couple) and I really wanted him to have a role in it all. He looked after my son for me when I went to hospital and has been really supportive with it all.
He's a really amazing man who I love (not in that way, but that's a good thing in terms of stability) and would make a great father. And I think he has started to want children. I am used to sharing parenting with a man who doesn't live with me and there'd be no romantic/ sexual complications like there are with my ex.
Is this completely bonkers or is it something that could work? I know people will say I'm just reacting to the miscarriage, but in reality, I think the miscarriage has just woken me up to the fact that there's something missing in my life that I used to want. There's no going back to before the miscarriage but, even if there was, I'm not sure I'd want to as life had got very stagnant. I have a career that I love and my son has progressed massively, to the extent that I think he will be an independent adult, but I have got so used to living life around work and my son that I feel I have forgotten to think about what I want.
And I want another child, and don't have much time left. So, AIBU to
be even considering this?