Hi going bananas,
Welcome to the group. Congratulations on raising your children with bpdw. If you have any tips I’d be grateful, as our children are still very young. If my wife was jealous and controlling before we had kids, (she was), having babies made her ten times worse. We are a lesbian couple so they have two mothers but biologically they are hers. I worked with children for over 20 years before we met (I’m much older which is why she had our babies by ivf). I have always been a confident parent and that’s one reason for her jealousy. She would shout at me for doing everything wrong in the first year with our baby. And I’d shout back. The only good thing about her behaviour worsening was that it drove me to seek help and then I joined the group here and it has improved things so much. My wife’s jealousy was even worse after our second was born as the baby was very sick in hospital and the older child became closer to me (my wife had always been so possessive over her, wanting to do everything with her and be the first to do things with her). Although my wife is a loving mother, she is prone to being quick to anger and shout at times and I think the children feel closer to me because of this because they can never quite trust that she won’t do this. Her behaviour has improved since I started learning so much on here, but I can’t totally stop her anger. Also when the older child is spontaneously affectionate towards me with kisses and cuddles, my wife is like, “don’t I get kisses and cuddles? Come and give me a hug!” I can already see how much this irritates the child and sometimes she refuses, which upsets my wife. She used to scream at me to put her down in the middle of reading her a story. And I did it to keep the peace
fortunately things have moved on since then. But despite everything I’ve learnt, I do wonder how things will be as the children grow up and become adults. I hope these wonderful people on here can advise you. I found it really helped to give lots of detail of what went down in conversations etc. It was so confusing at first getting my responses right, but I’ve got better at it. I always say, trying to remember what I’m supposed to say when my wife is ranting helps me to say nothing for a while and that in itself seems to help…