Older son from first marriage causing issues

[Mummamia87]

I would value people’s opinion please. I've been with my husband for 12 years, married for 5, and we have a little boy who's 3.

Before we got together my husband was in a long marriage from which he has an adult son, now 29. They haven't spoken since we got together . Yes it was through an affair which I know that was wrong but it wasn't just a fling. His marriage was effectively over, he was deeply unhappy, and we’ve ended up building a wonderful life together. I know that's only my perspective but I'm not here to debate the affair itself - it was a long time ago.

The issue is that every time our son reaches a milestone my husband reminisces about when his older son did the same thing. I completely understand why, but because they're estranged, it almost always ends with him looking sad.

Instead of just enjoying our son's moment, it's overshadowed by grief over the son he no longer has a relationship with.
I'm increasingly resentful that our son's milestones seem to become bittersweet instead of joyful. I want to say to my husband that our little boy deserves to have his achievements celebrated without them immediately becoming a reminder of someone who wants nothing to do with him.

Am I being unreasonable for feeling this way? Is this something I should keep to myself, or is there a kind way to raise it with my husband? Or do I simply need to accept that this is what grief over an estranged child looks like?

No, it’s that you’re putting the blame on the wrong person. This is caused solely by you and your DH. Your husband’s son has done nothing wrong at all yet you’re placing blame on him rather than looking at your actions and that of your DH. That’s why you’re getting a hard time here.

Maybe he is regretting everything and realising as time goes on the grass is not always greener

You’re brave posting on here, OP.

Predictably, you got pounced on. Everyone telling you you’re awful for having an affair 12 years ago has answered a question you didn’t ask and it’s neither helpful nor relevant.

Your husband is rightly feeling sad about his estrangement from his other son and of course those milestone remind him. But it’s not fair for those feelings to repeatedly eclipse your son’s milestones.

He needs to work with you on keeping the sadness from spoiling the occasion, and encourage him to get some proper support for the estrangement itself. Counselling could really help him. The couple of friends we have who had affairs and went on to marry the affair partners, have continued to have very close relationships with their older kids. It’s a real shame when this doesn’t happen.

Hit a nerve, yeh? 😏

Perhaps the eldest son doesn’t see it as a shame though? Perhaps he just set sees it as taking the trash out. He’s hardly missing out on a relationship with a man who didn’t give a fuck about him and put his own ‘wants’ first is he?

Nonsense. Everyone has been very clear just how wrong your husband was to blow up the life of his 17 year old son in his exams years, and behave so badly he's been cut off for good.

Seeing his second son reminds him of what he destroyed. He needs to deal with those feelings before he screws up his second family - like he screwed up his first.

Your guilt in that is being complicit in destroying that family and now you need to manage the emotional fallout that resulted.

But it was your husband who shoulders most of the responsibility as he's the one who betrayed his wife and son.

The point is OP, you didn’t have a clean slate when you married him. He came with problems. It was messy. There was a big problem with his son not accepting the abandonment.

But now, years later, now that the effects of those original problems are suddenly revealed to you by way of your DH’s sadness affecting your child, you feel that’s not right. You want the clean slate you pretended you had when you married him.

We are all trying to tell you that’s not possible. The problem already existed when you got together with him. He wasn’t free.

What to do to help your son?

All you can do is make it clear to your DH that he must keep his sadness to himself if he doesn’t wish to screw up another life. That’s his obligation to his second son. He could get therapy to help. Or go to the doctor if it’s depression.

You can also be the shield that protects your son from DH’s sadness. There are lots of ways to distract him from noticing in the moment. Or take him out for the day. Staying positive and cheerful is important if your DH is sad.
Long term, only you can decide if your marriage is worth the negative effect it has on your son.

Most marriages aren’t perfect. Lots of children manage to survive a parent being absent or sick or sad for the day or depressed for some of the time while they are growing up.
That’s why children have two parents.

Poor guy has buyers remorse 😂😂😂

No one has said you should be punished forever. But this is what you chose, what you wanted prevented you from seeing what could happen - it’s on you to manage the impact that your actions now have on your son. The same as your husbands son has chosen to manage the impact of what his father did had/has on him. You can’t protect your child from the actions of his father. Your husband on the other hand should and is being punished for what he did to his son, you might not like it or think it’s not fair but it’s what you chose when you decided to have a child with a man who fucked about the emotions/feelings/life of his son.

He’s being impacted by it due to a series of choices made by you and his daddy. It’s as though you naively thought that by having a ‘new family’ would eradicate the history of his old/pre-existing one and are now pissed off to learn that it doesn’t.

I do understand your very real upset for your DS who will start to notice, but actions can have very severe consequences that one can never foresee at the time, and that you can do absolutely nothing about.

You will never stop your DH’s hurt or change his feelings because his love is too deep rooted.

I think he really needs to find a way to reconnect with his DS1 and face him man to man. He’ll have to be very brave and determined, and move mountains to do so, but it IS possible if he is willing to take the risk.

I don’t mean you had a child for that reason, I meant if he wanted to build a relationship with his eldest child the worse thing he could do whilst trying to build that relationship was to have another child

I don't have any pain related to infidelity - I've never cheated on anyone and to the best of my knowledge, I've never been cheated on. No cheating in my wider family that I'm aware of either.

So I'm not projecting my own pain or "gaslighting" you by suggesting that anything in my own life is attributable to you. I'm looking at the situation from an objective position in which I don't identify directly with any of the people involved.

Presumably you understand that it's possible to have a moral objection to infidelity without ever having been directly affected by it? It is possible to believe that, if you commit to a relationship and then find that it's making you unhappy, then there is absolutely no excuse for not ending that relationship before jumping into bed with someone else? And it's possible to take a very dim view of a parent who puts his own sexual gratification over and above the wellbeing of his children, even when you haven't experienced the pain inevitably experienced by those children first hand?

Some of us are simply making the point that you created the current situation for your son when you decided to have a child with a cheat who had abandoned his first family. Surely you knew that you would always have to live with the long term consequences of the affair?

Ok being married does not make someone a hands on parent.
There's no evidence that he isn't a serial cheat nor does not being caught cheating before his son turned 17.
How do you know that he even wanted to leave his wife rather than keep both of you on the go and got dumped by his wife?
If your evidence is purely his claims remember that hes a proven cheat and liar so you can't trust a word he says.

The fact is you and your husband destroyed this then child's life with your affair. Then you have the audacity to attribute nefarious motives to his refusal to meet you or have anything to do with his dad when in reality you've never met him and know nothing about him and are now blaming him for his father's actions.

Your posts are getting more and more ridiculous as time goes on

The fact is you and your husband destroyed this then child's life with your affair. Then you have the audacity to attribute nefarious motives to his refusal to meet you or have anything to do with his dad when in reality you've never met him and know nothing about him and are now blaming him for his father's actions

Spot on.

Stop being so dramatic and self absorbed. Actions have consequences. Also, your husband's son doesn't owe your son a thing.

The OP said his marriage was effectively over and he was deeply unhappy. Pretty sure his son would not have wanted that to continue.

People on here are so quick to judge. Affairs happen, most of the time because people are in dying relationships and the love has gone or was never there. We have friends who had affairs. It’s unfortunate but these things happen and people deserve to move on and be happy.

If my husband and I split due to his infidelity, the last thing I’d want would be for it to damage his relationship with our kids.

I'm honestly not trying to have a go at you, but please re-read what you have written carefully and imagine you are seeing it as someone else might see it.

You say that, even if your husband only showed his sadness above estrangement from his child to you, then that would be unfair because it is "punishing" you?

Can't you see that that's an amazingly self-centred way to see it. His sadness isn't about you, at all, and you can't demand that someone stops feeling sad because it makes you uncomfortable.

Surely, now you are a mother, you can imagine the unbearable pain of estrangement from a child.

Do you really expect your husband just to get over this, because you don't like him being sad?

If you love someone, you have to support them through the struggles and tragedies of life. Not just demand that they cheer up because it's making you a bit uncomfortable!

Can you honestly not understand how deeply heartbroken your husband must be? Do you really think this is something he should just snap out of?

You say he tries to "reach out' to his son - I am not sure what the phrase "reach out" means in this context. What does he do, and how frequently, to try to rebuild the relationship. As this is something that people may actually be able to advise on, that could improve the situation.

You can't just expect your husband to accept that his son will never speak to him again and feel fine about this. Unless you can't comprehend that peiple other than you have emotions, surely this is not what you think......

What does your H say when you talk to him about your concerns for your ‘joint’ DC?
Talking to him seems an obvious step but you don’t indicate whether you have done so. Sorry if you’ve address this question and I’ve missed it!

Mummamia87
So I am a terrible person for not wanting my DS to be impacted by all this? And for prioritising him over my DH's adult son who wants nothing to do with us and who I have never met? I cannot possibly be expected to not feel differently about my DS.

No, you are a "terrible person" for blaming DH's son when he has no control over how your DH feels. Recognise that the issue has been your actions and your DH's responses to situations.

Please every guy says that when they want to get in some girls pants

That's about the only option if bridges can't be repaired between husband as his first son. Maybe husband would benefit from.indeprndemt counselling if he experiencing grief like emotions.

People do deserve to move on and be happy if they are in relationships which are not working. I just can't understand why they don't have the decency to end their existing relationships before starting new ones. Are they unable to control their sexual urges? Unwilling to end their existing relationships until they're sure that they have something better lined up? What exactly is stopping them from doing things in a way that is honest and fair to all concerned?

@Mummamia87 if you've seen my previous posts, you'll know I have a daughter who faced the same as the older son, so this is a topic close to me. But even so, I agree, of course, life goes on and the younger son shouldn't suffer as a result.

But to do that there needs to be some honesty and transparency, your DH needs to face up to the consequences of his actions either with you or in therapy. That may or may not lead to reconciliation but more likely maybe just processing the grief and acceptance. Either way he needs to face up to it in order to be a better parent to his younger child or at least a less selfish and self absorbed one - because as I said before, his self absorbtion at your son's milestones is rooted in the same shit and same character flaw as his self absorbtion when he had an affair and left his older child. Sometimes being a parent means putting the child first - and your DH failed to do that with his older son (for the record IMO 17 is the absolute worse possible age to leave - the kid is old enough to see everything but too unworldly to understand everything and all that crap is happening at a time of milestones that are absolutely crucial to their future life) and now your DH is failing to do so for your joint child.

Likewise you need to face up to the reality of how your family started and the long term grief that is putting on your DH. Like it or not the affair and subsequent estrangement is part of your family's story and bluntly that makes it part of your son's story. I'd suggest you take a cold hard look at it not just from your perspective but the perspective of the other people directly related to the events including the older son. And you need to consider how you'll address the reality of that for when your son is older - of course he doesn't need the details of your early relationship and what happened when it all came out but he does deserve to know he has an older brother and that raises some obvious questions. Knowing about it will help him understand the times when his dad can't hide his emotions, and it will prepare him in case there is a time, which frankly could happen, if the older son re-enters your lives, for example in your DH's old age or in illness.

This is a wise post, OP. I hope you will heed the advice in it.