Unplanned 3rd Pregnancy

[Lazybears]

We have two children already, 4 and 2 (they would be 5 and just about 3) at birth of the third. We’ve just moved house and have doubled our mortgage. We’re just about getting by financially and are just starting to be in the position to stock up a rainy day fund. On paper we can afford a third but it would be very tight and we’d drain any and all savings. We’d probably be one expensive car repair away from debt.

I desperately want this baby, it was always my dream to have three. My children have a tiny family (no cousins) and I grew up a very lonely child. I want to give them the family I never had. I think they would both adore a new baby. The two of them get along so well already.

But my husband doesn’t want a third. He’s been clear about this well before this pregnancy. Even having our second child was a compromise and it took him some time to ‘fall in love’ with our second. He wants to give them the fancy holidays he had as a child and feels like he’s letting them down because our quality of life hasn’t really been the same. He wants them to have birthday parties, music lessons and join clubs.

We have very little to almost no family support, financially we have always had to make our own way. My husband bears the brunt of the logistics of nursery drop-offs and pick-ups. He does the mental load of shopping and cooking. He’s a very hands on father and husband but is also at a point in his career where he has the chance to be promoted to quite a high level as long as we have flexibility to let him travel more.

I work full time because we can’t afford for me not to. But I’m a teacher, so I can have our children all through the school holidays. Yet, throughout the year I have various after-school meetings and parents evenings which require my husband to be available. I don’t think he’s ever been to his work’s Christmas meal because it’s always clashed with my job.

We’ve agonised over this decision for a week. My husband is convinced we will all suffer if we go through with it but when he saw the emotional toll on me he said we could have it if I couldn’t cope with a termination. I think on paper, the termination is the right thing for everyone except me. I just don’t quite know how to square it with myself. I’m not sure he will emotionally cope if we have a third, he’s been close to burnout already.

I’m not sure what advice I’m looking for really. Just quite shocked at myself for how emotional I’m being.

It sounds like you want this baby and would suffer from a lot of regret from terminating. On paper it sounds like you can handle it, there will just be some sacrifices hopefully made up for by sibling relationships. A real pregnancy is a different concept to a hypothetical decision about whether to have a third. I am always jealous of families with 3 close in age!

@HannahSternsBlouse “A real pregnancy is a different concept to a hypothetical decision of whether to have a third” what a brilliant way of phrasing it! This pregnancy can never not have happened and i honestly think that’s really hard to comprehend when you’re in the moment. You sound like you want this and what’s in your heart matters so much. I hope you get to the conclusion that makes you happy because don’t underestimate the importance of your happiness both to yourself and to your ability to be a good Mum.

mum of 3 here and can’t believe that this life might not have been. For us; the 3rd slots in perfectly, the 3rd is the family baby & her siblings adore her.

From your post, the fact that your heart wants this baby is clear. There are some posters on this board who have been less clear and gone on to terminate and felt devastated after, so I'd be very wary of doing this when you don't want to (although there are also of course many women who terminate and move on happily, and there's nothing wrong with having an abortion). Whatever you do, commit to it 100% and don't let yourself look back in the other direction. Trust yourself.

I have three children and my husband and I are both teachers also. I work a 0.5 contract and he works full time with some responsibility - financially things are tighter than they were with two but not horrifically so. It's not something that I feel stressed about day to day (although I did when I was pregnant!) There are some sacrifices, but they haven't hit us in terms of missing out on things like hobbies. I really catastrophised while I was pregnant but actually everything is fine and I'm happier now than I was with two, and I was very happy with two too. Maybe look around you at other families where there are three children, if they can make it work then maybe you can too.

You do mention your husband carrying the mental load. I know you work full time (is there any way you could drop a day, I don't think financially actually it makes a massive difference) but maybe talk to him about this. It might help with the way forward. How else can you split parenting tasks? And especially in the holidays, so it feels a bit less full on for him.

If you decide to follow your heart then you need to now think practically about what things will make it easier. If you decide that actually just having two children is already a struggle then know that you are making a truly brave and selfless decision, but be aware it can feel like a deep loss and let yourself grieve it.

I think you got very good advice from the people who already posted. No matter what you choose, there is no going back to the way things were before the pregnancy. You are either aborting, having another child, or having a natural miscarriage. Each of those has physical and emotional consequences that are going to affect you most of all. Your husband wasn't encouraging you to try for a third, but he didn't get a vasectomy either, so the possibility of another child was always there.

It's great that as a teacher your full time job does not require you to work as many days as some other jobs. Do you think that you could do more meetings on Zoom (or a similar platform) so that you can be home earlier/more? Do you have room for a large freezer so you can cook in larger batches and make meal planning easier? If you are able to think of small ways to simplify things, maybe adding a third child would feel more manageable to your husband. I was the oldest of three and it was a very nice dynamic. We didn't have fancy things, but I wouldn't trade anything for my siblings. Hope you can find a way through this that you feel good about.

@Lazybears how are you? What did you decide in the end?

I came home one day from work to find both my husband and eldest child crying. She’d interrupted a really important meeting and he said he was just feeling so much pressure trying to get a promotion to pay for the baby that he couldn’t cope. I just felt I would be robbing him of the chance to be the father he really wanted to be by increasing the stress. So I decided to terminate the pregnancy. It wasn’t painful, but it was unpleasant. I ended up with anaemia and am still struggling with it now.

I still think it was both the right and wrong decision. I suppose I didn’t deal with it in the best way, I just threw myself into my second job. But I’m okay. Money is tight so I can imagine if I was still pregnant we would be feeling really worried right now. I was also worried it was a multiple pregnancy, which we couldn’t have afforded at all, so perhaps it was for the best to end things before we had a scan.

My husband also said, in the immediate aftermath he regretted the decision, though he feels better about it now. So, if we’re lucky and there’s better timing, perhaps they’ll be a chance for a third one day.