Breeders Keep Advice Columnists in Business

I found this lovely thread that has not just one but two breeding hard luck stories, self-inflicted naturally.

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Geezer Breeder in a pickle
Q. I dread having another child: When my wife Beth and I became serious, we agreed we’d have three kids. I’d always been ambivalent about fatherhood, but falling in love with Beth, who’s a decade younger than me, made me want a family. I’m now in my late forties. We have two incredible children. And I’ve realized that two kids are my limit. I’m the youngest of six kids, and my parents were burnt out by the time I was born. They resented me, and I was largely raised by my big sister. Having a third child would exhaust me. Beth would have loved having five or six kids, and I dread disappointing her by changing the plan we made. We’ve seen two couples implode when one wanted more children than the other did. I’ve been putting this conversation off, but Beth has been hinting she’d like to try for a third child soon. What do I tell her, and how should I comfort her?

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Slate columnist's advice
A: Tell her today, please. If she’s already dropping hints about a third child, there’s no way you’re going to avoid having a serious conversation; I don’t think she’s likely to forget that she wants to have another kid with you. Don’t worry too much about comforting her just yet. She’s likely to have a number of reactions—maybe anger, maybe grief, maybe both—and you can’t rush her through them. Stick to what you’ve noticed about yourself, about your own capacity to be a present parent, what you’re afraid of (becoming stretched too thin that you end up resenting your kids) and what you hope for (to be a relatively relaxed, emotionally available parent to two children), and that you didn’t know you’d feel this way until you’d already had two kids. Then give her space to have whatever reaction she has. Don’t try to make the very first conversation you two have about this subject end on a harmonious note or make sure she’s totally comforted by this change in plans; give her time to ask questions and discuss this with you. But tell her now, because honest conflict will feel so much better than hiddenness and anxiety.

bell's advice:

What's that old joke? How are men like sod? Lay them once, properly, and you can walk all over them the rest of your life? It appears Dud got hold of some younger Poontang and conveniently "forgot" he was ambivalent about fatherhood, as some men do when dreaming of a future-lifetime-stream-of-Pussy.

Of course he should not have another child. His reasons are perfectly acceptable. As an aside, I'm incredulous there are people out there whose relationships "implode" because one of them isn't attaining his/her Fantasy Number of Children^TM, people who feel perfectly justified tossing out their spouses and THEIR EXISTING CHILDREN to pursue a relationship with someone who wants more children.

Let's hope for Dud's sake that he is married to someone who is sensible and willing to compromise, but I'm not hopeful. All too many people feel it's perfectly acceptable to badger their spouses in this area. Beth may feel perfectly entitled to run him into the ground and make him work until he's 75 to support the next little miracle. And speaking of miracles,someone needs to tell Duddy that he needs to WRAP IT UP or GET IT SNIPPED IMMEDIATELY. "Hinting she’d like to try for a third child soon," is woman-speak for "I shit-canned my birth control so we can start trying for kids RIGHT NOW."

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Our next contestant is obviously bad at math and doesn't realize 73% of second marriages end in divorce when both people bring kids to the marriage
Q. Stepdaughter resents her dad’s absence: My husband Clark and I live halfway across the country from his teenage daughter Tina. We see Tina as often as possible: holidays, summers, and Clark flies to visit her as much as we can afford that. I still know it’s not enough for Tina or Clark. I would gladly move to where Tina lives with her mom, but I share custody of two young daughters with my ex-husband. (Clark met me when he traveled to our city on business; we were both divorced.) Recently Tina has been standing Clark up for Skype dates, and when she came out for Christmas, she implied that she wouldn’t come stay with us this summer. She’s angry that her dad moved away, and she has every right to be. Clark is distraught, and we’ve been arguing lately, even though we both want him to see Tina more. How can we let Tina know she’s loved and as much a part of our family as my daughters? She has her own room here, she’s included in every family event big and small, we try to Skype several times a week—but nothing will make up for her dad’s absence.

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Slate columnist's advice
A: I think you’ve answered your own question. Your husband chose to move halfway across the country from his daughter. He may have had good reasons for doing so, he may have felt anguished at the decision, he may miss her very much and want to see her as often as he can, but that’s still the choice he made and it still hurt her. You can encourage him to continue to offer her as much love, support, and emotional availability as possible, even when she’s angry or tries to pull away. She’s a teenager and that would be normal even if he hadn’t moved away to build another family with you. But you can’t fix your husband’s relationship with his daughter for him. I don’t know if part of you feels guilty over the fact that he met you while traveling and now lives with you and your children and not his daughter, but that may be part of what’s driving your desire to “fix” the situation. But there’s a limit to how much you can do. What’s broken in Clark’s relationship with Tina is the fact that he moved away from her and now helps to parent your children instead of her. She has a right to be hurt and angry, and Clark will have to deal with the consequences of his choice with grace, understanding, and patience.

bell's advice: And they call the CF selfish? My heart goes out to Tina, who is the innocent victim in this shit storm of poor parental choices.

It occurs to me that out of all these supposedly-adult people in her life, it is Tina who has the firmest grip on reality. Tina has a stepmother and a father who are doing their darnedest to assure her that she's "a part of the family," when Dud ran halfway across the country to play "new family" with some other woman's daughters. Being told as a child that A is really B, is crazy-making, invalidating and makes a child distrust her sense of reality, which leads to problems down the line. Shame on both of these selfish, lying assholes.

My advice to these selfish assholes is to man-up, woman-up, and get a divorce. Fix the wrong they have done to Tina and the woman's kids, who are probably feeling guilty for their existence and wondering why the fuck Mummy and NewHusband fight all the time and why NewDuddy is resentful of them. Call it quits, admit it was a mistake, and align everyone back where they were before.

You had these womb products, now raise them and stop being so fucking selfish. If you must date, find a boyfriend/girlfriend in town and sleep over when the kids are not there. When these kids are 25 and after you've contributed to the therapy bills, then maybe you can live with someone.

Here are some grim statistics on the whole "blended family" nonsense.

I've never understood the blended famblee concept. It seems like an absolute shitshow. I'm the child of a situation like this and it SUCKS. My mom and her husband have adult kids, but she is very resentful of them and her husband makes her hang out with the happy extended famblee often, which includes the OG moo, her now-husband, and all the grandbrats. My dad died a few years ago and his infertile wannabreed wife took everything and told us to fuck off and it's probably because he knocked up someone else while they were together when she was Desperate for Baybee (she was also a decade-younger wife about the same age as the above). Really at the end of the day most of these people are monumentally SELFISH and couldn't give a shit about their Behind the Couchers^TM because they resent how the previous famblee actually expects them to, you know, pay for their sprogs, parent them, etc. Just one reason of many why I NEVER have dated breeders. God, they make things so unnecessarily complicated.

The Slate columnist's advice was pretty spot-on: tell her immediately, don't delay, don't expect the conversation to be neat and tidy and finish the subject forever because as far as you know she may feel blindsided by this. The one thing I'd add: start checking your insurance for in-network doctors for a vasectomy and set up an appointment.

Second letter: Tina has my sympathy. Being a teen is hard enough without having to navigate through step-family shit. Teens are quite adept at blowing things up to huge, but the fact that Dad went across the country makes it harder I bet. I hope she has good adults in her primary home & is getting help handling this. Maybe he should make the effort and come see Tina on her home turf, instead of expecting her to visit a strange home with someone else's children. She's old enough to see through the happy-blended-family bullshit. Don't force it on her.

The statistics on the blended family nonsense sure take the fun out of all those romantic comedies and Hallmark moments so many fools would have a person believe are reality.

And 75% of women who are self-supporting (and may be well off depending on where they live) wouldn't marry a man with kids in hindsight:

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Article
A Boston University psychologist researcher reported that of the career women who earned over $100.000 and had married men with children over 75% said that, "if they had do it again they would NOT marry a man with children."

I'm getting ready to watch a Tina-esque situation unfold with a friend and her daughter...duh was an ass, friend kicked him out but daughter still adores him...now he's involved with a woman at least 15 years younger than we all are. He still shows up to spend time with Tina-esque, but we all know what's going to happen as soon as he breeds with the new girlfriend.

Duh should definitely be either getting a consultation for a snip, abstaining, or leaving Moo if she wants more brats and he doesn't. Unfortunately, just getting snipped or keeping it in his pants may not save him from Moo getting up the duff by another man and making him raise it because "legal fatherhood" is something that exists.

She doesn't care that he can't handle more kids or is content with the ones he has because the only opinion that matters when Moo wants to sluice again is Moo's. I wonder if Moo has been a SAHM since they got married and maybe Duh's starting to poke her about finding an actual job now that the kids are school-aged, so she's looking to get another 5-6 years of unemployment by making another brat.

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As far as the teen girl, what the hell did the parents think was going to happen when Duh moved across the country to live with some other Moo and raise her kids instead of his own? I know I'd feel like right shit if my father left to be a father to someone else's kids when I still needed him to be a father to me, and invitations to family gatherings just aren't the same as having him around in person more often. Skyping is nice and all, but every normal visit is a fucking vacation instead of just a normal visit. She is the only one in the story who deserves any sympathy.

She's the only sane one in the whole equation and it's not just typical teen angst either. Her anger is legitimate, and I know this probably seems like a storybook ending for Moo finding a sap who accepts her brats from another man, but breeders never consider the impact a blended family will have on their kids. Tina probably hates her Step-Moo for taking her dad away, and she hates her dad for ditching her in favor of some other woman's kids.

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Cambion

I know I'd feel like right shit if my father left to be a father to someone else's kids when I still needed him to be a father to me

This happened to me as a young teen, only duh didn't move away, he just started ignoring me as if he had moved. He spent all his time and money on his girlfriend's younger kids, then would come home and bitch about how he was broke and had no time to himself. He was still dropping me off at school (at 7.30 in the morning so he could help girlfriend with her kids) and picking me up (about an hour late - can you say 'abandonment issues'?) but when he got tired of caring I had to drop out of high school two years early; there was no free bus because I lived outside the catchment area, it was 5 miles away and I couldn't even walk it because part of the journey was on a highway.

I have a lot of anger problems and recurring nightmares about how I was never good enough for that asshole, but I still tried to be a good daughter. It all came to a head though when I bought him a voucher for £200 of helicopter flying lessons for his 50th birthday... that he didn't even use - the company emailed me to say that it had expired - and two days later he emailed me to complain about my older brother and how he couldn't wait to be left alone. I wrote him the most politely worded "fuck you" in response, that he was not to think for one moment that he was a good father to us after mum left, that he deserved to be alone and that I was disowning him as my dad. Then I changed my email address and phone number (by this point I'd moved away to be with my boyfriend-now-husband) and haven't spoken to him in nearly ten years.

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freya
The statistics on the blended family nonsense sure take the fun out of all those romantic comedies and Hallmark moments so many fools would have a person believe are reality.

And 75% of women who are self-supporting (and may be well off depending on where they live) wouldn't marry a man with kids in hindsight:

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Article
A Boston University psychologist researcher reported that of the career women who earned over $100.000 and had married men with children over 75% said that, "if they had do it again they would NOT marry a man with children."

Hell, if I were single and made that kind of money I would NEVER get involved with a man who sprogged with another woman.

Because he will always put Sprogford or Shitleigh before me.

That is a no-no.

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lurker-derp

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Cambion

I know I'd feel like right shit if my father left to be a father to someone else's kids when I still needed him to be a father to me

This happened to me as a young teen, only duh didn't move away, he just started ignoring me as if he had moved. He spent all his time and money on his girlfriend's younger kids, then would come home and bitch about how he was broke and had no time to himself. He was still dropping me off at school (at 7.30 in the morning so he could help girlfriend with her kids) and picking me up (about an hour late - can you say 'abandonment issues'?) but when he got tired of caring I had to drop out of high school two years early; there was no free bus because I lived outside the catchment area, it was 5 miles away and I couldn't even walk it because part of the journey was on a highway.

I have a lot of anger problems and recurring nightmares about how I was never good enough for that asshole, but I still tried to be a good daughter. It all came to a head though when I bought him a voucher for £200 of helicopter flying lessons for his 50th birthday... that he didn't even use - the company emailed me to say that it had expired - and two days later he emailed me to complain about my older brother and how he couldn't wait to be left alone. I wrote him the most politely worded "fuck you" in response, that he was not to think for one moment that he was a good father to us after mum left, that he deserved to be alone and that I was disowning him as my dad. Then I changed my email address and phone number (by this point I'd moved away to be with my boyfriend-now-husband) and haven't spoken to him in nearly ten years.

This is awful. Your dad did this for a girlfriend. They aren't even his step-kids. How can he have not had the backbone to tell his girlfriend what his priorities are? Unless she was a jerk she wouldn't have argued that her family would come before his family. He neglected you for a girlfriend. OMFG, he could have postponed dating for a few year and both your brother and you had moved out.

You aren't the problem lurker-derp. He is. Glad he is out of your life.

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freya

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lurker-derp

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Cambion

I know I'd feel like right shit if my father left to be a father to someone else's kids when I still needed him to be a father to me

This happened to me as a young teen, only duh didn't move away, he just started ignoring me as if he had moved. He spent all his time and money on his girlfriend's younger kids, then would come home and bitch about how he was broke and had no time to himself. He was still dropping me off at school (at 7.30 in the morning so he could help girlfriend with her kids) and picking me up (about an hour late - can you say 'abandonment issues'?) but when he got tired of caring I had to drop out of high school two years early; there was no free bus because I lived outside the catchment area, it was 5 miles away and I couldn't even walk it because part of the journey was on a highway.

I have a lot of anger problems and recurring nightmares about how I was never good enough for that asshole, but I still tried to be a good daughter. It all came to a head though when I bought him a voucher for £200 of helicopter flying lessons for his 50th birthday... that he didn't even use - the company emailed me to say that it had expired - and two days later he emailed me to complain about my older brother and how he couldn't wait to be left alone. I wrote him the most politely worded "fuck you" in response, that he was not to think for one moment that he was a good father to us after mum left, that he deserved to be alone and that I was disowning him as my dad. Then I changed my email address and phone number (by this point I'd moved away to be with my boyfriend-now-husband) and haven't spoken to him in nearly ten years.

This is awful. Your dad did this for a girlfriend. They aren't even his step-kids. How can he have not had the backbone to tell his girlfriend what his priorities are? Unless she was a jerk she wouldn't have argued that her family would come before his family. He neglected you for a girlfriend. OMFG, he could have postponed dating for a few year and both your brother and you had moved out.

You aren't the problem lurker-derp. He is. Glad he is out of your life.

She was actually a really nice woman - in different circumstances we might have been friends - but she was a single moo, and enjoyed being fussed over by duh (hereafter referred to as Tom). Because my brother and I were teens (18 and 15 respectively), she probably figured that we wouldn't wanna be around Tom anyway, but we still needed him to be a father to us; when the power went out at home, he wouldn't do anything about it until he got back from her place, usually around midnight, but when SHE had a power cut at 3am, he went over to help her immediately.

Tom was a smart bastard, he knew if he hit us, people would see the marks and he'd get reported, so he stuck to verbal, emotional, mental abuse, saying things like "I'd love to have a daughter like that" (when we were in town and walking past a group of slim, pretty blonde girls the same age as me) and "if I had a daughter I'd call her Mercedes" - not 'if I had ANOTHER daughter', just 'if I HAD a daughter'. And he'd put my mum through that sort of shit for YEARS before she finally met someone who treated her like a person and not a meal ticket (mum was the breadwinner in our house). That's I don't blame my mother for leaving us, she had to get out when she had the chance, and I always held the belief that if she could have taken me with her, she would have. I found out last year that she DID want to take me with her, but she knew Tom would never have let me go - as long as he had me, he still had power over my mum, and the courts couldn't have given less of a shit if they tried, assigning me a social worker only to drop me when I turned 16.

Sorry, didn't mean to throw up my life story, it just feels good to vent.

Oh man, I am so sorry to hear that he was such a bastard to you. Sounds like he has some narcissistic leanings. When I was in grade 3, my mother cut all my hair off into a horrible bowl cut. I wore glasses and second-hand and homemade clothes, so you can just imagine how I was treated by other kids at school. After she did that, she would comment on how other little girls were so pretty, and call me Moonface and horrible names like that. I felt like an ugly lump my whole childhood. It friggin' hurts when your parents do this to you. Just want to let you know that I totally get how you would have felt, invisible, flawed, not good enough. That's how I felt. Internet hugs to you.

M6,

OMG! My mom did similar things to me. What your mom did was horrible and I'm sorry you had to deal with that, but it"s good to hear I was not the only one. Mom had a knack for picking out the strangest clothes in the store or catalog for me. She did not know or care what was normal. Also, I wanted a pretty feminine look and most of what she picked was rather unisex looking. I hated wearing clothes that did not represent my true personality. When I was a child I had beautiful hair, and mom cut it short every spring until I was 9 because she didn't want to deal with it in the hot weather. I was very tall for my age and started puberty very early, so that combined with the weird clothes and hair made me stand out for all the wrong reasons.I was also weird in other ways, many of which were her choice.

I think my parents were both normal kids for the time and place they grew up in, based on things they've said. But they were totally oblivious to the fact I needed to be normal for my time and place. When I complained they just said I should not care what people think. They had no idea how badly I was treated at school. I would think Mom at least would know how you dress matters for girls. BTW, I think she made most of the decisions about how to raise me, Dad just went along because he thought she knew what she was doing.

Parents suck.

M6 and Odinette, I guess we're all living proof of people having kids just because it's "what you do", and not thinking for themselves whether they even want kids or not.

This is why it's so important to get the CF lifestyle to be more accepted by society - we've all been left with lasting damage from the people who were supposed to love us; how much physical and mental suffering could be prevented by more people stopping to think "do I really want kids? Or do I want them because it's expected of me?".

Ondinette, I'm so sorry you went through that too. ITA with you, that parents suck.

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mumofsixbirds
Oh man, I am so sorry to hear that he was such a bastard to you. Sounds like he has some narcissistic leanings. When I was in grade 3, my mother cut all my hair off into a horrible bowl cut. I wore glasses and second-hand and homemade clothes, so you can just imagine how I was treated by other kids at school.

I agree and hope Tom didn't marry the woman. I think much of the bullying on kids results from their parents doing everything they can to insure their kids are misfits and likely stems from bullying on the part of the parent(s). And then telling them to suck it up and deal with it, conveniently forgetting that school is pretty much the life of kids until they become adults. And when you're 7 and being bullied sucking it up until you're 18 may as well be a thousand years away.

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freya

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mumofsixbirds
Oh man, I am so sorry to hear that he was such a bastard to you. Sounds like he has some narcissistic leanings. When I was in grade 3, my mother cut all my hair off into a horrible bowl cut. I wore glasses and second-hand and homemade clothes, so you can just imagine how I was treated by other kids at school.

I agree and hope Tom didn't marry the woman. I think much of the bullying on kids results from their parents doing everything they can to insure their kids are misfits and likely stems from bullying on the part of the parent(s). And then telling them to suck it up and deal with it, conveniently forgetting that school is pretty much the life of kids until they become adults. And when you're 7 and being bullied sucking it up until you're 18 may as well be a thousand years away.

He didn't; she broke up with him when something better came along. The reason it hurt so much is because until I turned 11, I was daddy's little girl - he made me feel loved and wanted and always put me high up on his priorities, until I started getting older, getting fat (from the adult portions I was forced to eat even as a young kid) and going from blonde to mousy brown.

I had occasion to catch up with a former friend recently. I lost touch with her after her grandkids were born because she threw herself into raising her grandkids. Her dumbass daughter was married to a loser. (They were separated within a COUPLE OF MONTHS after their wedding.) They went to counseling for a few months, got back together and immediately bred two mistakes. My friend was all, "yay babies!" and she ruined her health raising these mistakes. Her daughter could afford day care but dumped the kids on her mom, even after Grandmoo became seriously ill. What a selfish twat.

After the second mistake was born, Daughter got an unsurprising divorce. Both she and husband#1 married again. Selfish twat daughter is married to a guy who also has kids. ST's first husband immediately married another woman and they have since had a child of the RightGender. and then another.

How this is relevant to the topic: The conversation revolved around the drama that is these peoples' lives. Despite her progressing illness, Grandmoo is watching these kids still. ST daughter is fighting #1 over custody. In court, #1 acts like Father Of the Year, but when he has his kids from his first marriage, he ignores them and makes them babysit brood #2, while he plays video games. Apparently ST's now-husband is in similar custody/visitation battles with his first spouse. There are court-appointed psychologists (thanks to our taxpayer dollars) sorting through this whole mess. I need a fucking diagram and the lawyers are the only ones who are getting rich.

I got off the phone congratulating myself for not having a drama filled life. I was a stepchild (my father died at a young age) and my mom dragged me through needless drama. The sad thing is, my father's death was tragic, but it wasn't nearly as bad as what happened after when my mom brought an evil person and his kids into our home, my home too where I deserved to grow up in safety.

Many parents are selfish monsters themselves. They don't think before they have kids. They don't choose wisely and they don't think how they will raise their kids if something happens to their spouse. If they get divorced, they immediately go looking for NextSpouse because "I deserve to be happy," without thinking about their kids.

An ex-friend is getting divorced. No surprises there (she’s a high-maintenance person and she’s not even a kind or good person to be worth maintaining her). But she decided to have a child that she had no business having and now she wants to abandon her toddler to run off with a drug-addicted unemployed jackass she met online and expects her parents to fund this disaster. And I say that 1.) they don’t. She’s a grown-ass woman and can find a way to fund her mistakes; 2.) her ex-husband and ex-MIL need to lawyer up and go in front of a judge to not only secure sole custody of the kid, but ensure that she doesn’t get to come in and out of the kid’s life at her whim. If you’re going to get gone, stay gone. Repeatedly coming in and abandoning the kid is going to fuck it up worse than just the initial abandonment.

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"Why children take so long to grow? They eat and drink like pig and give nothing back. Must find way to accelerate process..."
- Dr. Yi Suchong, Bioshock

"Society does not need more children; but it does need more loved children. Quite literally, we cannot afford unloved children - but we pay heavily for them every day. There should not be the slightest communal concern when a woman elects to destroy the life of her thousandth-of-an-ounce embryo. But all society should rise up in alarm when it hears that a baby that is not wanted is about to be born."
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"Reality is a bitch when it slowly crawls out of your vagina and shits in your lap."
- Reddit comment

"Bitch wants a baby, so we're gonna fuck now. #bareback"
- Cambion

Oh whatever. Abortion doctors are crimestoppers."
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