This is my first post so please be gentle because I have absolutely no idea what to do. I think I just need to get all my thoughts out and an outside perspective.
I recently found out I am pregnant. I’ve been married 7 years and we tried for a couple of years, went down the investigative route, did all the tests, went as far as we could go down the IVF route that we could afford and naturally, nothing ever came of it. We just carried on our lives as normal, took the pressure off, I came to terms with the fact that it wasn’t something that was going to happen for us.
I am incredibly lucky to be in the position that I have two lovely step children, who I have a great relationship with - one of them cannot remember life without me in it, so I don’t feel like I’ve missed out on having children in my life as I’ve been there for them, I’ve been present and fully embraced being their step mum - I love them to bits and can’t wait to see them grow up and support them throughout their lives.
In terms of our working lives, my husband has a well paid, secure job and last year, he supported me through the massive change of me pursuing my dream of building my business that I started whilst working in my own, decent, secure job to become fully
Self employed. Since then, the business is going really well, had a massive year planned and the momentum is just building up and as a result I was hoping to grow it further after a year of long hours and massively hard work from the both of us.
Now I’ve found out I am pregnant. Neither of us saw it coming. Not on the cards at all. My SC are teenage and almost double figures, so they are growing up and thriving, and we saw ourselves planning our next steps - building the business so we both could do it full time and involving the kids, buying our forever home for the four of us, supporting them through the next big years in their lives. We did not see a baby in the mix, and I have no idea what to do.
I genuinely enjoy my life at the moment - we have a good marriage, my husband is supportive, I have a lovely relationship with my SC, good family and friends etc. I’d come to terms with not having a child of my own. If I hadn’t have discovered that I was pregnant, I think I’d have just carried on with life and not given it more thought other than, it simply isn’t going to happen for us.
Now it has, I just don’t know what to do. We’ve spent since new year discussing it, the repercussions of what is going to have to happen, how the dynamic will change, how the hell my business is going to keep going when it’s literally only me that can do the work for it, how we are going to support a maternity leave when I will have no income, supporting three children not two, how we are going to pay my high business rents, rates and overheads again whilst I’m making no income, the mortgage, the car, the bills, all that, and actually as to whether it is something that we both still want in our lives.
My husband is a good man and will support me in my decision. He understands that it is something I need to decide for me and how I feel.
But the thing is, I don’t know what I want. I’m happy and have been really fine with everything as it is at present and looking forward to the years ahead on the path I saw them going, just the four of us.
I’ve always been a bit of an odd person in terms of the way that I’m very independent, don’t suffer fools, just get on and sometimes come across, admittedly a bit cold and cut and dry when it comes to decisions. I can just switch off feelings and bury them like it was something that never happened. I wonder if I do that with this and decide not to go through with it, I’ll regret it one day.
At the moment, the negative is outweighing the positive. My reaction when the test came back positive was ultimately that I burst into tears and thought “f**k, everything’s over”, and I sort of spiralled into worrying about the fact that we’d have to move house, I’d lose everything I’d worked for, things wouldn’t be the same etc. If when we started trying 6 and a bit years ago, I’d have fallen pregnant, it would have been the perfect time, there wouldn’t have been so much that could go wrong. Now, it’s just the worst time for so many reasons and I worry that if we do go through with it, it will just open the flood gates up to a barrage of upset and issues and take the joy out of it all.
I don’t even know if this is an AIBU post, I think I just needed to write all this down and see if there was anyone else who had been in this position before. I am utterly exhausted with going backwards in my mind. My gut says no, carry on as before, but there’s a small part of me that can’t help but wonder.
Thank you for reading, sorry it’s so long