"Why on earth did you have child(ren) with this man"

[Februaryblooms]

AIBU to think it's a pointless and goady thing to say to somebody who already has children or is expecting one to somebody who (obviously) is a bit of a shit?

I see it so often on MN on here and the relationship threads.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but in all of the cases where people have said that to the (usually upset) OP its too late to do anything about it and she's clearly already aware of her poor judgement so it just looks like rubbing salt in the wounds to me.

Thoughts?

x post susie.

Thank you.

x post susie

Argh! Posts gone haywire!

Another good point about boundaries. My mother to this day does not allow me to have a boundary. She got angry with me recently because I asked her not to let herself in to my house. She said she was ''disgusted with my appalling behaviour'' and went full on martyr beast on me, she was so HURT and disgusted. Im still dealing with this shit.

I left my x, and the past is a different country (I like that) but I don't blame myself for having returned to a disfunctional dynamic.

how exactly are you supposed to judge whether or not someone has the qualities of being a good co-parent before you've even been a parent yourself? It's impossible to imagine what parenting is like before you are one,

You first get to know someone well enough to judge whether they have the qualities of being a good person. Whether you can make important decisions together, how they deal with problems, how they treat other people, how they behave when you say no to them.

I was in a shitty place when I got together with DH and if he'd been a wrong'un I'd have been fucked. Who the hell has any of that when they first start TTC?

See above. You shouldn't even be considering 'TTC' until you have all of that. A few months isn't enough time to choose someone you are going to saddle a child with for life.

No - like I said - if you believe bad relationships to be normal then you think that other relationships are like that behind closed doors as well. Most of the time abusive men behave perfectly normally when you are in public so you don't realise that other people don't change, it's like farting. I have never heard 90% of my friends fart, but I know they must do it when they are alone, or perhaps when they are just with their partners, because obviously, everyone farts. It is like that, you assume that your friend's husband also throws things and gets sarky when you ask him to help because that's just what all men do, isn't it? (I know now that they don't).

Because more people need to know that abusers only start when you're pregnant, that's why.

Exactly Bertie

@susieowl4, I remember thinking (or feeling?) that it was easy for other women to leave abusive relationships, but that I wasn't like those women. What did I mean by that? well, I didn't mean that I felt I deserved to be treated like shit, but I had FELT and this was my experience, that everything in life came harder for me than it did for other normal women. Everything from getting a job, passing my driving test, getting a job, winning people over, making friends, finding a place to live. I felt that there was something about me that people didn't like, didn't warm to, some weakness in me that made all of the normal things harder to come by.

I don't feel like that NOW< I'm trying to explain it to you. This is why I stayed in an abusive relationship for 5 years. However, one of my fantasies was that I would win the lottery and walk out the door, ie, that it would be EASY to leave. So it wasn't really that I wanted to stay with him, just that it felt so impossible to get away.

I had nowhere to go and no money when I got there so it's no wonder i used to fantasise about him dying and me winning the lottery.

@SelkieRinnNaMara I felt the same. I fantasised about him crashing his bike and dying. I can't believe I'm admitting that out loud. I didn't ACTUALLY want it to happen but I wondered... then reality hit me and I realised that he's still my son's dad, and no matter how awful he is to me, the courts will still allow him access to my son - but that's a whole other story.

ps, and I've never had another abusive partner. I've had ONE. So I did learn from it. I left eventually and I did find everything very difficult and some of my fears /hunches about finding all of the normal things ten times harder than other women find them did come to pass. Ie, passing any sort of exam (even though I don't feel stupid) finding a job that worked around my dc, building up a new life, making friends, having a bit of LUCK finally, none of that stuff fell in to my lap when I left so in that regard, I was right, I wasn't a lucky person at that point. I had to leave knowing (without having labels for any of this) that I was living by the archetype of the orphan really and that everything was a struggle for me and that nothing came easily.

but I did leave eventually and NOW I am in a good place in life. I understand human frailties better than most I think. My abusive relationship gave me an interest in psychology and philosophy.

Natural - yes - but none of that is obvious until you've had children, IME, because you don't really think about parenting as being those things. And "any of that" I was referring to mainly refers to parenting experience- which, clearly, nobody has when they start thinking about having their first baby. So you've completely taken my words out of context.

Also, where does the assumption of a few months come from anyway? Many people are in relationships for years before having children, and still discover, after children, that the bloke they are with is a terrible co-parent and/or father. And of course if you know what to look for you can see that coming a mile off, but they don't - because they aren't looking at it with the necessary context. The other issue is that the kinds of things which are a problem after you have children often don't even present themselves as an issue before children, because living as two adults who happen to share a house and have a relationship is an entirely different ball game to managing and sharing the responsibility of a family together. If you've had the kind of marriage from the start where both of you have considered the two of you a unit and a team, it generally works very well to simply expand this into a family, but if you have been living like many modern couples do, as two independent individuals it can be a huge adjustment.

I absolutely get so fucking annoyed when mothers reach out and ask for help with the situation, housing or financial and some shit bag asks them why they had so many children. Who is that helping ???

Agree. I've had it said to me, and although my ex has done plenty of stupid shit so have I. Someone could just as easily say it about me.

Also another point if I may, despite my parents' shit parenting, my self-esteem was never so low that I felt I deserved to be treated like shit, but years later I read how integral self-efficacy is to self-esteem.

That is believing you have the power to change your own life. And that was what was missing for me at that time. ANd not without reason at that time!! Every single ''normal'' thing I'd had to do (exams, job-hunting, flat hunting, friendships, relationships) had seemed a million times harder for me than they had seemed to be for my friends. I couldn't put my finger on what it was.

Now I feel that I have control over my life. I have changed my life. But I understand the person I was back then.

Any small change in my life back then would have represented SO much effort and I would have felt (backed up by my own history at that point) that my herculean efforts never bore much fruit.

plus of course, when you have a child you're often financially cornered which is part of the abuse of course.

And then, it is a confusing line. People say ''leave for your child's sake'' and yes in the longer term that is the right thing to do but to walk out on to the street with a child and nowhere to go and no money when you get there and no plan and no support - in the short term that does NOT seem like the best decision for your child.

I sat there making pros and cons to leaving. Pros and cons to staying and I cross-referenced them against each other.

I know somebody who got pregnant at 14 to a drug using water. At 14 she wasn't mature enough to know that he was no Prince Charming I suppose. He started to physically and emotionally abuse her after the birth. I would hear her screaming, being shoved against walls, him yelling the most awful things at her. She then got pregnant again two years later. After her DC was born, he stepped up the abuse, regularly leaving her for days on end with no phone and no money - he would take her bank card and phone when he went. More than once, she would knock on my door asking if she could borrow my phone to ask her mum to bring nappies or milk - her mum wasn't allowed to be there when he was there. I had a long chat with her last summer where she opened up about her poor mental health, that she wanted to leave him but also wanted more children, and didn't want her children to have different fathers. So she stayed for that reason only. Despite the constant druggies congregating outside the house, having her windows put through twice by rival gang members, the social services involvement, the police turning up all the time.

So it seems women make poor choices for lots of reasons often despite knowing that it is a shit choice, but not feeling strong enough to make a different one. To kick them when they are down, by mocking them or screwing your eyes up in wide eyed confusion about staying with an arsehole, is arsehole behaviour itself. It is shitty. You can think what you like, but its kinder to keep it to yourself sometimes.

YANBU.

I can't pretend it doesn't come to mind sometimes, but it's such a bullshit, simplistic response. It's like asking someone in extreme poverty 'why didn't you keep a financial buffer?' or someone miserably obese 'why don't you just eat less?'. Completely accurate in theory, and very smugly satisfying to say from a distance (here I am, solving your stupid problems with a single line!), but the reality is so much messier.

I don't think anyone can be completely mystified as to why some women put up with unthinkably horrible relationships and have children with awful partners. Anyone who thinks this is always stubborn female stupidity and/or a calculated plan, has clearly led a pretty pleasant life; had a decent father, knew decent men, grew up expecting respect and dignity and that they were a person worth love.

Good for you, if you've had this, but:

• some women are raised to think nothing of themselves and expect less.
• some men start off nice enough when they're the focus of all your attention, then become deeply unpleasant, resentful and unhelpful when you have kids.
• women, as a class, are not praised for being confrontational with men. There's an entire lexicon for women who ask too much or don't shut up: nags, shrews, divas, bitches. All these are frequently used by abusers to lower women's expectations and gaslight their concerns.
• men, as a class, are often raised with a sense of entitlement, especially to free time, lack of domestic and child-care responsibilities, and to an uncomplaining, accommodating partner.
• women are subtly (and not so subtly) encouraged to compete for men, to set their worth by having a partner, and to mistrust other women's agendas (without this bias, the 'my ex is a crazy bitch who won't let me see the kids' wouldn't be half so successful).
• people are hopeful. It is a bleak thing to look at a relationship into which you've invested time and energy, or at a person you love, and realise it's actually a miserable toxic situation and they don't love you at all. Existing in a state of perpetual denial or optimism defers that crushing moment.
• same as above, maybe more so, for seeing that the father of your kids doesn't care about them at all. Just the worst thing to recognise.
• when partners have changed for the worse, your memory of the initial nice, kind (or kind-seeming) partner takes a long, long time to fade. You don't want to give up on that person.
• women are encouraged to think they can change men for the better, in terms of emotional intelligence and general not-being-a-twat.
• women are also held to blame for men's relationship twattery, either because they've failed to fix him or they put up with it.
• kids love you. They are a huge responsibility and, without support, day-to-day life can be unbearably hard, but your kids love you and that's like emotional heroin to someone in a loveless relationship. I'm not actually surprised some women have more and more kids with hateful men. No: it's not at all fair on the children, but they bring affection and dependency and a family, however flawed, where there was nothing.

Some women absolutely need a relationship intervention, but there's a world of difference between saying 'you and your kids deserve more than this; your partner's behaviour is not normal or acceptable, and here are some steps you might consider' and 'yeah, well: why did you have kids with him?'. The second is barely pretending to be helpful; just making sure that someone knows they've failed in their fundamental duty to procreate with a quality male or to fix an emotional fuckwit.

so true @luyu, so well put

I totally agree OP
But i also see that it is useful for the lurkers.
As someone who doesn't have kids I know I've really thought about who I choose to have them with because of threads like this.

Very well said, luyu.

But also: An imbalance between the sexes is absolutely ingrained in our society. I can hardly think of one of my friends' relationships that is properly, genuinely equal in terms of energy expended in working, looking after the family, etc. The women always do more and are expected to put up with less. And these are naice, outwardly progressive couples, and the women all say they're feminists. They still put up with it, though.

Other women put up with the slightly more extreme versions of these relationships because society tells them to. And for society at large to then turn around and tell them that their partners' behaviour is somehow their fault is victim blaming in the extreme.

No, not all men are like that. But there is a spectrum of slack, self entitled behaviour, and most men are on it.

@LuYu I want to copy and paste your comment onto every thread where I see the OP being asked this very question.

You, crackofdoom and some other PP's are absolutely correct in everything you've said

Yup

Used especially when they are pregnant too

*but:

• some women are raised to think nothing of themselves and expect less.
• some men start off nice enough when they're the focus of all your attention, then become deeply unpleasant, resentful and unhelpful when you have kids.
• women, as a class, are not praised for being confrontational with men. There's an entire lexicon for women who ask too much or don't shut up: nags, shrews, divas, bitches. All these are frequently used by abusers to lower women's expectations and gaslight their concerns.
• men, as a class, are often raised with a sense of entitlement, especially to free time, lack of domestic and child-care responsibilities, and to an uncomplaining, accommodating partner.
• women are subtly (and not so subtly) encouraged to compete for men, to set their worth by having a partner, and to mistrust other women's agendas (without this bias, the 'my ex is a crazy bitch who won't let me see the kids' wouldn't be half so successful).
• people are hopeful. It is a bleak thing to look at a relationship into which you've invested time and energy, or at a person you love, and realise it's actually a miserable toxic situation and they don't love you at all. Existing in a state of perpetual denial or optimism defers that crushing moment.
• same as above, maybe more so, for seeing that the father of your kids doesn't care about them at all. Just the worst thing to recognise.
• when partners have changed for the worse, your memory of the initial nice, kind (or kind-seeming) partner takes a long, long time to fade. You don't want to give up on that person.
• women are encouraged to think they can change men for the better, in terms of emotional intelligence and general not-being-a-twat.
• women are also held to blame for men's relationship twattery, either because they've failed to fix him or they put up with it.
• kids love you. They are a huge responsibility and, without support, day-to-day life can be unbearably hard, but your kids love you and that's like emotional heroin to someone in a loveless relationship. I'm not actually surprised some women have more and more kids with hateful men. No: it's not at all fair on the children, but they bring affection and dependency and a family, however flawed, where there was nothing.*

Excellent.

Yes yes to the above statements

So true and nails it