I (32F) and my 37yo husband have been married for 9 years and have now 4 kids. Things have been good for the most part until the past couple years.
Some backstory..
December 2020 rolls around and he made friends with a 20yo female at work that he’s sneaking around to hang out with and suddenly he doesn’t think things are working with us so moves into a new apt and starts dating her.
Summer 2021 divorce papers are in the works, I’m seeing other people as well so didn’t care that he was sleeping around. Mid July he starts saying/acting like he wants to work things out.
September 2021 I find out I’m pregnant despite being on birth control. In our state a divorce can’t happen during pregnancy, he’s still asking to work things out so I figure why not.. for the sake of the kids give him til baby is born to prove it.
February 2022 a post shows up in my timeline bc a mutual friend was tagged by of one of the girls he slept with last summer.. she had a baby. I show him and ask if it could possibly be his. He denies all knowledge of a pregnancy and says it’s more than likely some other guy she was sleeping with, but admits having unprotected relations with her bc she was on birth control.
May 2022 our 4th child is born and things seem to be going well.
Now to present day… Thursday our 4yo was diagnosed with autism. I’m super stressed about this to be honest bc I want to make sure I do the best I can to get her the help she needs and I have no idea where to start. We start discussing dropping to just my income bc I make more and having him be available to take care of her and baby and get them to therapy and doctor appointments, etc.
But then today, I while he’s at work got a notification that he had a new fb message so I look at it. (Part of the agreement for working things out was open access bc of the prior sneaking so that’s why I have his password and since I’ve logged in prior on my messenger it tells me when he has new messages) In all honesty I don’t feel like I should have to be checking and policing so I don’t normally look but his sister was coming at some point today and I was hoping it was her letting us know a time they would be here. But it wasn’t. It was that girl threatening to message me.
He gets home I ask him why. He says probably bc of her daughter. Why does he think that? Bc she messaged him a week ago saying they need to talk and he deleted it. He says bc it annoyed him but I feel like it was to hide it from me. Why would he think she wanted to talk about that? Bc what else could it possibly be..
He says don’t worry she doesn’t want child support. How does he know that? bc when she told him she was pregnant she said that she wouldn’t ask for it….bc apparently she told him when she first found out and he’s known all along. And yeah that’s easy to say before you actually have to try to pay for the kid on your own.
I’m kinda freaking out. I was already stressed about our daughter and am currently running on very little sleep since baby is only 2 months old. He’s annoyed that I’m upset but all I can think about is how if it is then he will have to pay child support which will possibly completely screw us over financially and make it difficult If not impossible to afford our daughters therapies. He asked if I hated him and wanted a divorce and I said no and his answer was good bc if I did divorce him he would kill himself.
So now idk what to do. Maybe he’s right and I’m over stressing before we even know for sure but I have 4 kids to take care of,, I can’t just “wing it”. I always have a worst case scenario plan but for this.. idk.
So if it is his, I don’t WANT a divorce although I was considering it to protect my kids and my assets. Technically he didn’t cheat as we were separated although I feel like he kinda tried to conceal how likely this would be. I feel trapped bc of his threats to harm himself if I want out of this whole situation. I don’t know if we should try to ask for partial custody so my kids can know their half sibling or try to make contact as minimal as possible so I don’t have to worry about her being a threat to my marriage. Idk if I could treat the baby kindly in our care even tho I’m fully aware that it isn’t the child’s fault. I just want it to go away.
It’s just so much running through my mind right now and I can’t sleep and have very few friends bc mom life so I have no one to talk to and I’m falling into a pretty major depression spiral with some dark thoughts. I know this is long so if you read it all thanks
Tl;Dr during separation husband possibly fathered a child. Now reconciled and finding out and I don’t know what to do
4 comments
I’m a little confused.
You and he split up in December of 2020 and you find out your pregnant in September of last year. You were seeing other people and on birth control, are you sure your latest baby is his?
All sounds very messy.
I think it would help you to pursue individual therapy to work out your feelings around this. Maybe marriage counseling as well but I think the individual should cone first given the situation and his threats to harm himself. That’s emotional abuse and it’s unfair to you.
I think you should determine paternity and then talk to an attorney who specializes in custody. His threats to harm himself are manipulative and you’d probably benefit from counseling (he would too) to learn how to navigate that and have more productive disagreements without resorting to scare tactics.
basically 99 % of the people on this sub who stay with cheating partners get burned. Yet people keep doing it because they dream of being the rare unicorns that make it work. Short and sweet: if your spouse fucks someone else, give them the boot.