I resent my children for stealing my wife's love



Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I asked my mother a question. It was a challenging question because I was a challenging sort of boy, and my mother knew it. She also knew how to give as good as she got.

My question was this: ‘If my dad and I were drowning, who would you choose to save?’

She didn’t hesitate in replying. ‘Your dad.’

I was completely taken aback by her answer, but I also didn’t believe her, until I asked her to explain why.

Just the five of us: Keith feels pushed out of his wife affections by his step-daughter and two sons

‘Because I chose your dad — I didn’t choose you,’ she said. ‘When you and your brothers have all fled the nest, got married, had kids and moved away, your dad will still be here for me.’

From that day forward, my mother’s logic stayed with me. But more than that, it made me believe in the power of love.

Not the kind of love that a parent has for a child, but the kind of love that is chosen by two adults who want to share their lives together.

It was hammered home with devastating force last year as I watched my dad caress his wife’s — my mother’s — hand the day before she died from Alzheimer’s disease.

Theirs was the kind of love I aspired to my whole adult life and the kind of love I believe I now have with my wife, Rebecca.

Except that something — or rather three things — are getting in the way of my grand passion. Their names are Daisy, Tom and Sam — and they’re our children.

Don’t get me wrong, I love them intensely, but sometimes I find myself resenting them so much that I fantasise about the day I wave them off to university or wherever so that I can have their mother all to myself.

When I met Rebecca, she already had a baby daughter. But that didn’t matter to me. All that mattered was her big brown eyes, her smile that illuminated the room and the fact that we seemed to have so much in common. She was The One.



For the next year, we saw each other most weekends, enjoyed romantic restaurants, weekend breaks, walks in the countryside. All the cliches of a couple in love. And we were in love. The fact she had a child barely came into the reckoning because Daisy spent so much time with her father and when she was with her mother, well, I was at work.

Even when we moved in together a year later, I barely saw Daisy. I worked long hours, so by the time I came home from work, Daisy was in bed. And at weekends, she was with her dad again.

It was as if — for me — she didn’t exist.

Then along came Tom. Our first-born was perfect in every way and I felt an overwhelming surge of love for him. But the moment he was born, my relationship with his mother — or, rather, her relationship with me — changed.



Happy days: Keith and Rebecca had time for romantic walks in the country before they started a family

I was no longer the number one man in her life. Like all newborns, Tom slept in a crib beside our bed and, more often than not, in the bed, in the ever-growing gap between us. And I started to resent him, not all of the time, but enough of the time for it to cause tension between his mother and me.

I talked to my best friend about it. Was I being pathetic, selfish, petulant, unreasonable? He, too, had become a father for the first time, but felt resentful of the threesome that he and his partner had created.

One night, the jealousy he felt towards his child erupted into an almost irretrievable row which ended with him storming out screaming the words: ‘But what about meeeeee?!’

And therein lies a truth. Many men I know married for love, not for children. They hooked up with their wives-to-be because they wanted to spend their lives with those women. Children didn’t come into the equation.

There was no biological imperative to procreate, no ticking hormonal clocks. They wanted all the things I wanted from my relationship with Rebecca which, at its most basic, boils down to two things: friendship and sex.

Of course, we men like to be hero-worshipped, too. And for a while I was. But when children come along, the inner child in men like me (there are many, truly there are) emerges, too.



'Many men I know married for love, not for children. There was no biological imperative to procreate, no ticking hormonal clock'

Men like me want to be at the centre of their partner’s universe. Men like me thrive on putting their women on a pedestal. It’s why men like me have historically written all the best love songs.

But, when children come along, they change all that. They turn us into providers, transform us into responsible adults.

They take everything, but give little back.

All right, I know a special smile and a cuddle from your child are supposed to make it all worthwhile, and often these moments are so heart-meltingly special that they stay with you for ever. But, in reality, they are just a clever evolutionary trick to distract us from what we’re losing.

What we gain in hugs from our kids we lose in intimacy with our partners. And I resent that.

I won’t deny that a huge part of my male ego was fulfilled by having children. They provide irrefutable evidence of my masculinity and providing for them satisfied that part of my ego even more. At least until I lost my job. Of which more later.

Indeed, it was I who decided to extend our family after the birth of our first child, despite the resentment building within. You see I (or was it my ego?) wanted a daughter of my own.

Part of this was because I am the eldest of four boys — and like a petulant child who wants what he’s never had, I wanted a girl.



On their wedding day: Keith married to be with the woman he loved, not to play second fiddle to children

Also, I’d seen the special relationship Daisy’s dad had with his own daughter, and I wanted to replicate that.

When Rebecca and I went for the second scan — the one where you get to know the sex of the baby if you so desire — I had my fingers and toes crossed that ‘the bump’ would be a girl.

Unfortunately, the awkward little so-and-so refused to play ball with the sonographer and ‘its’ gender remained a mystery — until he emerged, kicking and screaming into our living room.

There was no doubting his sex and, ashamed though I am to admit this, crushing disappointment replaced the usual first flush of love one is supposed to feel for one’s offspring.

Here was another man about the house for my wife to adore more than she did me. And oh how she adored him. For her, it was love at first sight. For me, Sam’s arrival signified a further push towards the fringes of her affections.

When the dice are this loaded, there’s no point even playing the game. I retreated into myself. I did what I needed to do by duty, in terms of night feeds and changing and taking the other two off her hands while she got on with the crucial business of nursing her third-born.

But I felt invisible. Nothing more than a to-er and fro-er. An aide and assistant.



'The arrival of our second son signified a further push towards the fringes of her affections'

Work gave me respite because at work I was in control. I could dictate the terms. And that’s where I found my sanctuary. And it turns out I wasn’t alone.

A recent survey found that 62 per cent of men would rather hang around at work than go home to their children. They’d rather file papers than deal with their offspring. I was most definitely in that majority.

My selfish logic dictated that there was nothing to lose. If I arrived home after the kids were in bed, I’d have my wife to myself.

But by now, the love of my life was a permanently tired, stressed-out, no-time-for-me-but-all-the-time-in-the-world-for-three-children portrait of maternal coping.

Not once did she complain, not once did she say: ‘What about me and my needs?’ She just got on with it. Which, ironically, was one of the reasons I fell for her in the first place.

She is not just a woman I love, not just a woman I like: she is a woman I admire. She is everything I’m not: stoic, determined, self-contained. She is what I want to be. I want her to admire me as much as I admire her. But I only have one love of my life — and she has three. No contest.

I would arrive home with a bottle of wine in one hand and a recipe in my head, determined to impress the part of her that first fell in love with me.

I’d marinate and create, dim lights and set the scene. But just as fork was about to enter mouth, there would be a wail from upstairs and the mood was killed.

‘Ignore it,’ I’d say, simmering.

‘I can’t ignore it. He needs me,’ she’d reply.

Even on the rare nights when all stayed quiet from the children’s rooms, she would push her food to one side of the plate and look at me apologetically.

‘Sorry, love. I’m too exhausted.’

And then at 10pm, she’d announce she needed to go to bed — and I don’t mean with me. ‘You stay up and watch the news, love. I’m going to get an early night,’ she’d say.

So I would sit up, drain the bottle and fester, stewing more than the plate of lovingly prepared coq au vin she’d abandoned. My step-daughter is nine now, and our sons are aged six and three. But the issues remain. The demands of night feeds and nappy changes have waned, but the children are, if anything, even more demanding.

They bicker non-stop, fighting over everything from whose turn it is to have a bath first, to which colour topping to have on a cupcake. It’s relentless. I want to push my fingers deep into my ears and sing la-la-la and wish them all away.

But as far as my wife is concerned, they have their needs, and I have none. Are her needs fulfilled by constantly pandering to theirs? I don’t imagine so, but I haven’t asked her because we don’t really talk any more.

We have become so wrapped up in our own worlds that we either daren’t speak the truth, or we are both too resentful of the other to go there: she because she resents my resentment; me because I resent the fact my children have stolen the woman I fell in love with.



'As far as my wife is concerned, they have their needs, and I have none'

Four months ago, the resentment I’d managed somehow to keep at bay became dangerously acute. My wife and I swapped roles. I’d been made redundant from my job as a senior manager at a publishing company. Despite dozens of applications, I couldn’t get another job. Fortunately, my wife could and is now the editor of Britain’s biggest selling women’s weekly magazine.

Now, everything she used to do around the home and for our children, I do. And so, with every shirt I iron, every toilet I scrub, every tantrum I ameliorate, I find myself thinking: ‘If it was just the two of us, if we didn’t have kids, we could sell up, move to the Outer Hebrides and live off the proceeds of our home.’

But, no, ‘the kids must come first.’ Their needs must come before mine.

Not only do I have to spend every waking moment tending to their every bickering need, I also have to soothe the stressed-out Successful Other Half when she walks through the door after a hard day at the office.

And what does she do when she walks in? A kiss for me, perhaps? An enquiry about my day? Oh no.

As she hands me her coat she says: ‘Where are my babies?’ They go running into her arms and I retreat to the pub.

So, who would I save from drowning: my wife or my kids? Actually, I think I’d just throw myself overboard. I doubt they’d even notice.

Chronicles Of A Reluctant Housedad, reluctanthousedad.com