Feeling rather down. Okay, very down.

[xiphias]

At some point, I'll post about how adorable my nephew in Florida is, and how he ate his first birthday cake. But not right now.

For once, it doesn't feel like just plain chemical depression. It feels like it's got a cause.

A bunch of things have triggered this. Several friends pregnant with their first pregnancies. Other friends with kids. My nephew's first birthday. And the realization, which I've realized before but generally manage to squelch and push out of my mind, that Lis will never want to have children. Or sex, but mainly children. And I do.

We had something of a major fight tonight about it. Although our major fights tend to be a lot less dramatic than our minor fights. I mean, if we're fighting about one of us forgetting to load the dishwasher or something like that, well, tempers can run REALLY high, and we can yell and all of that. But when it's a fight about the fact that our fundamental life goals are really different, well, there's not much to say about that or to get all that loud about. Emotional, yes. Loud, not so much.

The fact is, what I mainly want from my life is to raise children. The fact is, Lis really doesn't want kids. And won't. The fact is, we've been ignoring this forever.

And the further fact is that neither of us is willing to leave the relationship, because we love each other, like each other, depend on each other, and are unwilling to look at any solution that involves us not being together.

I'd be willing to adopt. Lis wouldn't be -- she doesn't want to go through pregnancy, but she ALSO doesn't want kids. And she feels that she'd be even WORSE with kids who didn't share her DNA than ones who did.

This is one of the reasons why we've always intended to be poly -- we always suspected this situation. And a situation in which I had a relationship, and a child or two, with another woman, who lived in the same building as us, well, that would more or less work for her, and for me. But it seems like a situation with all sorts of emotional unstabilities, even if we KNEW someone who would be interested in such a situation with us, which, as far as we know, we don't.

But, well, the ONLY goal I've ever had for my adult life was to raise kids. If I don't do that, my life, basically, will have been a failure. I mean, we all set our own "win states" for life, and mine is raising a reasonably well-adjusted kid or two.

This is fundamentally incomprehensible to Lis. She doesn't get the concept of setting a single win state for your life, and not being able to change it, or add other ones later. Because, probably, she's better mentally adjusted than I am. But she can not comprehend what I'm talking about when I talk about my life being a failure if I can't have kids.

If anyone has advice, I'd be glad to hear it. I'm not interested in sympathy, though. Would mainly annoy me at this point.

Comments

[shmuelisms.livejournal.com]

if you find another woman to have children with, in what ways do you see your relationship with Lis changing to accommodate your new primary focus (ie, your kids)

Much more than that, seeing the way this "goal" is so central to Ian's definition of self-worth [I neither agree or disagree with this], it would only be natural to expect that Ian's primary affection would also shift to the mother is his children as well. Dealing with THIS change, IMO, is the really the toughest issue that Ian & Lis have to discuss, and this isn't something that can be "worked-out" as things happen, because then would be much too late to be even remotely objective about it.

Having no experience of polyamory, I can only say my gut feeling is that it is best for the children, that mommy and daddy be each other's primaries.