Am I being unreasonable? Dad to be...please help

[simba86]

My wife and I, married for 3 years, together for 10, in our late 20s are expecting our first child at the end of May.

My wife has never really got on with my parents, particularly my mum, and whilst they live 2 hours away we see them ever couple of months.

I am obviously very excited about becoming a dad. I love my wife more than anyone in the world and so much looking forward to having our own family. I am also looking forward to being a proud dad and introducing our baby to my parents shortly after the birth, when everything has calmed down and my wife is well enough to see not visitors, but our immediate family.

However because of the break down in the relationship between my wife and my parents, my wife does not want me to let them know if she goes into labour, so that they are not hanging around the hospital or nearby, nor does she want them to visit after the birth until she is ready, which she has indicated could be many hours after the birth, or when we go home, or even a week or so after the birth. She is so stressed out about this she has driven off tonight after writing me a letter saying she doesnt want me at the birth, nor does she want me to be her husband.

I can assure you I have been as supportive of her and her family over the past 10 years more than most people could ever imagine, and as someone who has a rare medical condition with no known cure and an uncertain future, an only child, I don't want to miss out on a special moment for me.

I dont want my parents hanging around or interfering and have made that clear to my wife, I just want to share a moment with my parents, my wife and our baby shortly after they are born when my wife ia well enough.

Surely this isn't me being unreasonable....or is it?

Please share your opinion on this

I am totally staggered that I need to provide more context to my last post, and stg thank you not for necessarily supporting me but for understanding as so many people on here seen totally incapable of doing, that things are rarely as black and white as a short poston here can describe.

Earlier that day I had met with my wife during my lunch hour (she drives I can't for medical reasons before I get that thrown at me), we went out for lunch, looked at a cpiplet of house locations where we are looking at moving to and then I went back to work. About an hour before I was due to finish, she called me to say she was having pains in her side, she wasnt sure what they were, had called the midwife who recommended her to attend the maternity triage where we are having the baby. She insisted she would drive there to save moneybut I booked her a taxi and said I would meet her there asap after work.

In the hospital there is no phone signal at all. So both I and her mum couldn't get hold of her (her mum called me a couple of times for updates on my way there). I called her mum when I got to the hospital and said I would keep her updated when wr knew more. 4 hours then went by before we were told that everything appears normal but they were calling for a.doctor to.examine her further. At this point my dw asked me to call her mum to let her know what was going on.

When I stepped outside the hospital to get a signal I calles her mum straight away and then rang my parents and spoke with my dad breifly. The conversation consisted of me telling then where we were, that my dw had some unexplained pains (nothing more detailed), that the tests had all come back ok but that they were calling for a doctor. My parents care about my dw deeply and wanted to offer their help if needed, obviously not medically but if we needed someone to.come up and look after our pets while we were in hospital or to help with transport if needed.

I am a first time.dad who has tried for 2 years to get where we are. Regardless of that though its only natural for a dad to be worried if something appears wrong with either wife or baby. And if I am something of a control freak which clearly from your assessments of me I am, then the worst part is being personally helpless in medical terms to help in this situation. Men deal with things by trying to find answers to problems rather thanthinking or worrying about things in my experience,so when we dodon't have an answer for something so important that is.quite a hard thing for us to deal with.

So, the fact that I called my parents not to cry down the phone to them, but to let them know that someone they care deeply about is in hospital and for a little reassurance for me that whilst I cant answer what is wrong we are in the best place for an answer...is wrong and I shouldn't have done it because pregnancy ia all about the woman and I should just deal with it.....like a man..... in your eyes?

How ironic.

So if your dh or partner unexpectedily fell ill...you would not mention this to anyone until they have made a full recovery, and then maybe mention it in passing conversation over a brew and biscuits when talking about what you did last week?

Apologies for the grammatical errors and typos btw I am posting using predictive text and a Samsung phone. ..not a good combination in my experience!

Your wife knew you were phoning her mum (that was clear from the last post), but she didn't ask you to let your parents know did she?

I would feel exactly the same as your wife did - I would phone my mum first chance I get (mainly because she is a trained nurse) but I wouldn't want to let my in laws know. They were oblivious to my pregnancy issues including bleeds and the fact that my waters had broken. I didn't want or need them to know, it was my body and my choice.

If my partner falls ill then I will tell people (his parents, my parents) IF and when I know he is happy for me to do so.

Ah - simba -so you're not a bit sorry that you called people who your wife can't stand and discussed her medical condition, without her consent? You think you can justify it. That much is clear.

And your wife's assessment of the situation is obviously accurate as well - you can't be trusted not to call them to tell them she is in labour. Which is something she's made clear she doesn't want.

I'm not a bit surprised you were on the sofa. I'm totally with your wife here - you are getting more and more unreasonable about this every day.

Someone has already said that this would be against her rights under medical data protection. Being married to her does not mean you can sweep aside her human rights! She is a human still?? Or has she been reduced to a mechanical womb who exists to care for you and your precious mummy?

Honestly Simba, will you ever learn? You've have been given so much excellent advice on this thread, taking up a lot of people's time and efforts and you STILL haven't cottoned on?! I despair at you.

I don't know that his will help you any more, but here's some black and white facts for you:

1. Your wife is terrified - beyond your imagination.
2. She is about to lose control of her dignity, body, and with you around, her RIGHT to privacy. Contoling everything that she can at this time to make sure she's safe is normal and should be respected by you. She's in survival mode and your not helping by constantly challenging that.
3. She's about to have to put her body and baby in the hands of professionals she's never met and hope and pray they do a good job. Every pregnant woman has here enough horror stories to terrify her to her very soul. Adium g to the terror. Even if things to well.

So, Simba, your role until baby is a good few weeks old and your wife is feeling a little more like herself again is:

DO WHATEVER MAKES HER FEEL SAFE and HAPPY.

Don not argue, try to persuade, coerce or use emotional black mail. I caution you that she will never forgive you if you ruin the birth you child by not respecting her wishes.

I also caution you, that IF your wife develops post natal depression she will need you and need to be able to trust you completely. At the moment she can't. She will get the baby blues when baby is a couple of days old. If your insensitive during this time the damage may be disasterous for her emotional health.

"Men deal with things by trying to find answers to problems rather thanthinking or worrying about things in my experience,so when we dodon't have an answer for something so important that is.quite a hard thing for us to deal with"

Oh, you are a "Men are from Mars" fan?

Believe me, your wife will also have been terrified not to have an answer.

So you called your parents for reassurance when you were already told everything appears normal? Nope! You just do what you want to do and you're not considering your wife in any of this. It's your job to support your wife, you should be a team after all! I really hope you grow up and support your wife when she is in Labour. Stop going on about how much they care for your wife, she doesn't get on with them and you have to remember that. It's incredibly intrusive to share a medical issue with somebody else.

Simba, which is more important to you? Your wife thinking you are right or your wife thinking you are supportive?

Look, I sympathise that you felt worried and wanted to talk to someone but have you apologised to your wife for talking to your parents without checking with her? Or are you too busy saying, effectively, "no, men need this or that, so my actions were right, and you are wrong?"

Simba I know you read my last post and didn't like at all what I said. The reason I was so vehement is I am in the unfortunate position of being married to a man with a relationship with his parents like yours. I have spent 15 years being verbally abused by his parents who can do no wrong. We are now in the position where I cannot bear them anywhere near me or our children because of my dh pulling things like calling them about me being on labour or telling them the ins and outs of all my medical issues which are not of their concern. It is unhealthy. It is the only issue in our marriage and it is destroying us.

Stop now, apologise to your wife, you are at fault for this and start putting her first. She is likely scared stiff after a visit to hospital and needs to be wrapped in cotton wool. She needs to know that you put her first at the moment.

And I'm sorry but if your parents are anything like my pil who say they care deeply for me, they feel nothing of the sort they are just interested in the baby and their baby, you

simba if my partner was ill, had a medical crisis I would phone his mum IF he wanted me to, no I wouldn't tell my parents without his permission as its his choice to tell people about his medical issues, not everybody wants them shared.

The other year my eldest son had a medical issue which required a trip to a&e and an emergency operation, we sought advice first of by calling my mum, a nurse and ds1 was fine with this. We then kept each other updated ie dp kept me updated as I stayed home with little ones whilst he was with ds1 at hospital. I then updated my mum the next day once I knew all was well.

We didn't tell other relatives ie mil, aunts etc in the midst of this crisis and infant we didn't tell them all afterwards, only those who ds1 said we could tell as it was his medical info and we respected his privacy.

Why are you unable to respect your wife's right to privacy. Oh and what's with all the my parents care deeply for my wife bollocks?! Fgs you have made it quite clear there is no relationship bbetween your wife and mother at least, they don't get on. You say your wife doesn't respect your parents yet you are also trying to say they care for her deeply... Yeah right.

And you haven't answered questions re your wife's actual behaviour ie you say she is irrational etc but you give no context.

Apologies for typos - not easy with an 18 month old at your ankles!

Totally don't believe your parents care deeply for your wife and my guess is you don't really either. Just another thing to beat her over the head with.

Just as we seemed to be getting somewhere!

Simba. You have actually regressed in your dawning understanding of the situation from your wife's POV. In your penultimate post you at least got why your wife said she couldn't trust you not to go running to your parents with the news that she was in labour. Now you're back to justifying your behaviour.

FWIW, I was one of the people who said that I did fully understand why you would want to ring your parents from the hospital. However, as countless others have pointed out, YOUR WIFE is the patient and it is therefore her call as to whether you share her medical information with others. That has to take precedence over your need to reach out to your parents for comfort. In this particular situation, given the back story, it shouldn't have been particularly difficult for you to predict that your wife would go postal upon being told you'd rung them. So, either you completely lack insight into your wife's likely reactions, or you are perfectly well aware of them and told her after the event in order to get a rise out of her. Which is it?

Incidentally, I am wondering why you included the apparently irrelevant anecdote about overriding your wife's intention of driving herself to the hospital. I'm sure you were probably right to err on the side of caution, but instead of getting your wife to agree you just booked the taxi and thereby took her choice in the matter away. It's another case of control dressed up as caring- do you not see that? It's no wonder the poor woman wants to retain control over something!

Look, you say your parents care deeply for your DW, but it's also abundantly clear that your DW is deeply uncomfortable around your parents. She must have her reasons for suspecting that if you ring them to say she's gone into labour, they will be camped out in the hospital lobby as soon as humanly possible. She doesn't want that. She wants to wait until she feels equal to seeing them. At no point has she said she doesn't ever want them to meet the baby, she just wants a bit of recovery time before they do. Do you not understand why this is not unreasonable?

I think the way this is going is that Mrs Simba will soon realise that the only way that she can guarantee that her PIL don't know she's gone into labour is if she doesn't tell you either, and I think she feels strongly enough about the situation to follow through on her threat to do it. And however much you bang on about your "rights", you will find that you have precisely none in this matter. You therefore need to move away from justifying to apologising and assuring your DW that you will allow her to call the shots- and then suiting actions to words.

"At this point my dw asked me to call her mum to let her know what was going on"

And did you reply with, "will do, darling, and I'll just call my parents as well in case we need help with the pets."?

If I had a crystal ball I would say in 10 years time I'll be there with your very unhappy child because you haven't realised you lack empathy and have a skewed idea of control. A few days ago I suspected MH and maturity issues, now I am almost convinced. I am finding it fascinating to some extent to find a person who sounds exactly like a kid with behaviour/emotional/social needs due to emotional control/abuse... but they're a full grown adult.

for understanding as so many people on here seen totally incapable of doing
Something most people learn as teenagers is that 'understanding' doesn't mean 'agreeing with'. It's a difficult phase and contributes to angst and that 'I'm a victim' thing teenagers do when they're being obnoxious. Here, you're still doing that - people understand completely but do not agree. Big difference.
It's like the 'truth' phase some kids have (true = what people believe - so either they say what they want to be true repeatedly or conversely become vulnerable because they think no one will believe them). I see traces again of not having grown out of that.

Just going to repeat me mantra: mental health is as important as physical health: get help.

Apologies - underlines came out as crossed through.

Oh, and the sub-GCSE English single-line "how ironic" does nothing to make you sound any less like a precocious teenager with a reasonably bright IQ who sounds like and adult so thinks that they are one, even though their cause-and-effect reasoning is not developing due to mummy issues.

I think I'm giving up here.

So much useful advice and yet....

D'you know I think Simba could provide the material for a whole psychiatrist conference.

"My parents care about my dw deeply and wanted to offer their help if needed, obviously not medically but if we needed someone to.come up and look after our pets while we were in hospital or to help with transport if needed"

Your parents don't care about your dw at all and neither do you. You're giving them a way in aren't you, to intrude on her while she's vulnerable. If they cared about her, they'd respect her wishes. That's what people who care about other people do. You haven't learned that because you haven't been taught how to care. Your mother sounds smothering and her "care" involves sticking her oar in where she's not wanted. "If we needed some to come up..." - your wife has clearly stated that she doesn't want her to come up, so there's no if about it - they will not be needed. And yet still you persist. Your poor wife. I hope she comes on to Mumsnet to get the support she needs.

"I am a first time.dad who has tried for 2 years to get where we are." Sorry, are you a lion cub or an elephant? What do you mean 2 years? Pregnancies last 10 months, how else have you been wearing your DW down for the last couple of years?

"Men deal with things by trying to find answers to problems rather thanthinking or worrying about things in my experience,so when we dodon't have an answer for something so important that is.quite a hard thing for us to deal with."

Don't blame your genitalia for your disgusting refusal to engage with solving the problem you have. Plenty of men manage to be reasonable, decent, nice people capable of conducting functional, loving relationships with women. Their penises don't seem to stop them growing up.

FFS book that therapist.

You weren't told to man up, you were told to act like a grown up and put someone else first for a while. I ask again: what will you do when you have to rush a toddler to A&E on your own? (Likely as you will be SAHP, toddlers end up in A&E with injuries from falling/mysterious temperatures about as often as heavily pregnant women get sent to hospital to be checked out)

Sometimes as an adult you have to take deep breaths and wait before seeking your own support. And when it involves someone else's medical needs then you do need to consider whether they would be happy with you passing details on to the person you are seeking support from.

You cannot force your wife and mother to have a good relationship by ignoring the fact that they don't. This is just causing distress to at least your wife.

So simba is a)lying about his parents' feelings towards his wife or b)deluded about their feelings towards her, and think they love her when actually they hate her. There's no way he could actually provide a reasonably accurate (even if slightly biased) assessment of their feelings towards her.

But based on one thread, and not knowing these people, we KNOW that they hate her? Sorry - but that is stupid. Even if he is not being completely dispassionate in his assessment, he knows his parents a damn sight better than we do. But heaven forbid anyone on here should accept he knows anything about anything.

Simba, you really ARE on the verge of losing out on one of the greatest experiences in life. You do know that, right? The experience of being present when your child is born. You also appear on the verge of losing your DW, too. Is 'being right' more important? Is getting what YOU need more important? Because that's surely the road you're heading down.

If, indeed, you have struggled for 2 years to conceive (which is the way I interpret your statement) then I would think that you would do anything and everything possible to keep your wife and unborn child safe and happy. Instead you are doing nothing but frightening her, upsetting her, and betraying her. And in turn, risking your unborn child, because nothing is worse for a pregnancy than stress. For what? So you can get some 'comfort' for yourself? Well, friend, that will be COLD comfort when she (and your child) are gone from your life. Do you really want to end up an 'every other weekend' dad? Because that's what I foresee.

You need to think very long and hard, Simba. IS IT WORTH IT? IS IT?

And here's another thing. Would you have the courage to show this thread to Mrs Simba? If you are so sure you are 'right' and that we're all 'wrong' then you should have no fear of showing it to her. 'Right makes might' and all that.

Go on, show her. I dare you!

So if your dh or partner unexpectedily fell ill...you would not mention this to anyone until they have made a full recovery

I would absolutely ask his permission before I shared ANYTHING with ANYONE.
If he asked me to phone his parents, I would do so. If he asked me not to tell my parents, I would keep quiet. If I needed help with pets or children, I would talk to him so we could work out and agree what to do.
I would be furious with him if he divulged private information about me, to his parents, without my permission. I ended up in hospital several times in my first pregnancy and never once did he feel the need to discuss the matter with his parents (or anyone else for that matter). It really is black and white.

That is the thing that you consistently fail to understand. You do not seem to think that your wife has ANY right to privacy, because what is happening to her is affecting you, so you think that it becomes about what you need and you get to decide what you share and with whom. You are showing a complete lack of respect to your wife, every time you fail to ask her permission to share something about her, with your parents.

This is HER pregnancy. She gets to decide 100% about what gets shared with whom.

When she has the baby, decisions will be joint, where you AGREE together on what gets shared - I suspect that concept is somewhat alien to you.