I’m worried that my DH is storing up a whole load of hurt and I think he would benefit from some counselling to unpick some of what he’s been through. He says he doesn’t need to though, he buries his emotions very deep.
His mother and father had an affair (she was unmarried, he already had a partner and another baby), she claims his conception was an accident. She has told me and my DH on several occasions how the extended family wanted her to terminate the pregnancy or give him up for adoption. His father wanted no part of it, and had no interest in any relationship with him and say him only a handful times throughout his childhood. His mother has also said she was so devastated at being pregnant that she thought about killing herself. I mean, who tells their child that they couldn’t go through with a termination because they had done it once before? So, if she hadn’t already had one abortion my DH wouldn’t exist. She packed him off to boarding school when he was 7.
We did have a relationship with his father in later life, and he was interested in being a Grandpa to our children. He passed away last year though, leaving my DH with a lot of unanswered questions.
I feel that the my poor DH has spent his whole life feeling unwanted, an inconvenience. His mother continues to play the victim, and makes out that DH should be grateful for all her sacrifices and basically that he exists at all. What I find now though, DH reacts angrily to many of her behaviours. On some occasions he overreacts to small things that she says or does I think, because inside there is still that child who was made to feel unwanted and unloved.
Don’t get me wrong, I do sympathise with her. It can’t have been easy to bring him up alone and she did have to scrimp and save to give him the education he got. She did make a lot of sacrifices, but in my mind the child exists because of you. They didn’t ask for anything. I look at my boys now and it breaks my heart to think of my DH at that age, not really understanding but wondering why his father didn’t want him, his family didn’t want him and his Mum sent him away (supposedly for his own good).
I know it’s up to him to discuss it if/when he wants to but I just wish he would talk about it to someone as sometimes I look at him and he’s just so sad. But maybe I’m projecting how I would feel if I was him.
Should I keep trying to get him to open up or leave him to it?