mum

I was googling this topic, not for myself this time but someone else and came across this post, read the vast majority of it before it clicked that I had wrote it. lol We tried to do the IVF thing, it just never felt right for both of us and we cancelled the remainder of our appointments. Then in September 2016, about when we should have been starting the process, there was a massive storm, our entire state was in a blackout and the IVF clinics back up generators failed. A whole heap of the embryo's were accidentally destroyed. Guess we will never know if that could have been us. Turns out finding Australia's best relevant surgeon, flying hubby 1300km away to go under the knife a second time, handing over a fair amount of cash to said surgeon, and a trip to Italy for our 16th wedding anniversary has done the trick. I also didn't listen to an answer to a prayer a few years ago which specifically told me to leave my horrible dead end level 1 job. There was significant work place bullying and the majority of employees, including myself suffered some pretty horrible depression and anxiety as a result. I stayed for about a year before finally listening. Went for an interview for a level 1 job, got called back for an interview for level 2 job 30 minutes closer to home. Got that, 3 months later was promoted to an acting level 3 job, did that for 2 months before being officially promoted to the level 3 job. Did such a great job in my first month as a level 3, the board of directors gave me a further pay rise. Now I'll get some pretty decent maternity leave, meaning I can take so much more time off when baby is born. So it seems everything has turned out just as it was meant to, and perhaps I've learnt the hard way to not ignore the answers to prayers.

2 weeks of school holidays and then my husband working this particular Thursday on has meant we have missed the past 3 weeks, we usually go weekly. I am very much looking forward to going this week for this reason, as well as doing the work for our ancestors of course. My husband was a foster child, people seem to think people only need parents while they are children. While being an adult reduces the need for a parent for basic survival, growing up to be an adult without parents is horrible. I often wish we had a similar model to that which I hear occurs in the US.

We are quite young considering we have a 13 year old, my husband was 18 when we married, 19 when she was born. I was born the year before him. Adoption is highly unlikely, bordering on impossible to occur where I live because the number of children who are placed for adoption each year hasn't reach double figures for years. Foster care is something I would love to do down the track, I also know that when the time is right there will be children who we will introduce to the gospel because we will be their foster carers. But it is not something that has the possibility of leading to adoption with our current laws. Both myself and my husband have a long history with foster care, have been approved carers in the past and are well versed with how it operates in our country, the constraints it places on a family are such that it would interfere too greatly on our children. Foster care in our country is about getting children back to their family rather than building ours. Most importantly, we would not be able to devote enough time to a foster child to provide them with the extra care they would deserve. Caring for a child who has been neglected and abused takes so much more than parenting a child you have given birth to.

Both myself and my husband have been very blessed with 7 beautiful children. We are and always will be thankful and grateful we have been blessed to be their parents. However, we have know for several years now that there are still 2 more spirits waiting to join our family, to the point where I hear them calling to me just about every time I go to the temple. We have tried unsuccessfully for about a year now, a few months ago test results were promising, but we found out this week that there is absolutely no way we could have another child without IVF/ICSI. The shock was followed by anger, then by a brief time spent questioning my faith (why would this happen if we are doing what we are suppose to do?). This lasted a few hours before I came to the conclusion that there must be a reason why this hurdle has been placed in our path and we simply needed to jump it to get to the finish line. I also was then able to look back a several recent events and realise the path has actually been prepared for us. The 2 questions we have is what we will do if it does work and we are left with frozen embryos and what we do if it doesn't work, I haven't been able to find much information from a LDS perspective on this subject. For the first one we are pretty sure we would want to donate them. We have many friends and family who live with infertility and if we could give them the chance at being parents it would be a added positive benefit to the rather negative situation we found ourselves in. If ICSI is not possible, receiving donated gametes would not be something I would do, even if the church's view on this were more positive and my husband stated he was ok with it. It is not something I feel comfortable with. Having a child that is not genetically linked to either of us is something that we had considered long before we knew we couldn't conceive any more biological children unassisted. The only thing is that with my limited research, it's not very likely someone in my country would donate to a family with 7 children. We live in a society where having lots of children is often seen as being greedy and irresponsible.

My children are all vaccinated, I'm a registered nurse so I'm well aware of potential side effects. I don't do flu shots though, one I reacted badly to them and two we seem to have a pretty strong natural immunity to it, the only strain that has ever visited our family was swine flu. Gardisil was one was on the fence with though, the potential benefits compared to the potential side effect had me wondering if it were worth it. I did end up signing the forms for my DD to have it though. Vaccines causing children to be on the Autism spectrum has been debunked multiple times and even if it was shown to increase the risk I'd still do it. As an avid family history researcher, I know how common it was just 2 generations ago to have to bury anywhere from one to several children. Having 7 children all growing to be adults used to be a lucky exception to the rule, now just loosing 1 would be an unexpected tragedy. Vaccines are one of the reasons I can now expect my children to reach adulthood. I would rather have an autistic child than a dead child and I have a child on the spectrum so I'm not ignorant to what it would be like. I also know the cause of his autism and it has nothing to do with vaccinations, more to do with the fact we can keep sick children with genetic traits, who would otherwise have died in infancy, alive.

The other concern I read is your reference on more than one occasion about "fulfilling his needs." I assume this must be one of the excuses he often uses to justify his behaviour and only shows he wishes to shift the blame from himself to you. A marriage is a partnership based on love, respect and honesty, it is not about what you get from it, it's about what you give. The problem lies in when one person in the partnership abuses this and become solely a taker and never a giver or when what they give causes harm. He has given you lies, broken trust, put your health at risk, put your financial position at risk, put your future as an eternal companionship at risk. What exactly is it he is giving you that makes him think you in anyway need to fulfil his needs? Are you so far devalued by him that you feel you must subject yourself to fulfilling his needs in order to prevent him going elsewhere? Don't be blinded by his so called 100% honesty at the moment. He is only being 'honest' because the other woman ended it. If it wasn't for that, he would still be there. He is doing the 'band aid fix' to give you a false sense of hope. He doesn't love you, he loves the fact he can use you. People with addictions often loose their ability to genuinely love a person, they pretend to love them just enough to keep them there fulfilling their needs. In my case it was a severe gambling addiction, I went from being a family member to being nothing more than a source of money and they would stoop to any low to get that money. I still love that person, they are still very much a part of my life, but I had to learn to be strong enough to protect myself, to stand up for myself, to value myself, to accept that I can't fix everything and to do that I needed to remove myself from the situation and give myself time to grow. That person hit rock bottom, it was horrible to see, but they had to learn to fix themselves and now they know that taking advantage of me will not be tolerated. It was then that I could support them in building back their life, it has been 6 years now.

He will never be committed to fixing anything because he has no reason to. He can do whatever he wants to you and you will still love him, still want to be married to him, have his family waiting at home for him, what incentive does he have to want to change? I have lived with a family member who was an addict, sadly the vast majority of people with these problems follow similar patterns. Unfortunately they most often need to loose everything or 'hit rock bottom' before they discover that they need to change. The longer you prevent him from hitting rock bottom, the longer his addiction will continue for. You can not help an addict recover, the only person who can do that is themselves. You need to stop trying to help him and if he seeks help from you, support him by giving him information on where he can seek help from professionals as they are the only ones who can help him. Pray for him, fast for him, love him as the father of your children, but not as your husband. You need help to build up your self esteem. Ask yourself this, is your husband the kind of person you would want your daughter to be married to, to spend the rest of eternity with? Is your husband the kind of man you want your son to grow up to be? If your answer is no, then why would you not want your daughter or daughter in law to have to live like that, but you are happy to subject yourself to it?