Call Reddit user Dislikemythird a “horrible person” — and she’ll agree with you.
According to a recent post on the social media site, Dislikemythird loves her two daughters but does not like her 3-and-a-half-year-old son “at all.”
She explained:
It all starts with the fact that my daughters were very much planned and wanted pregnancies. My son was not. I didn’t realize I was pregnant until 16 weeks when I first felt the baby move.
She continued:
I sobbed my eyes out when I realized I was pregnant because I didn’t want to be pregnant again, hence the birth control, and it was too late for an abortion anywhere in my country. I probably would have had one, to be honest. Both my husband and I were pretty adamant we didn’t want more babies. I hated the baby/toddler stage with my daughters and with them being 3 and 4.5 at the time, it was like having a prison sentence extended right before freedom.
The Reddit user admitted that she was finally starting to really enjoy her two oldest children and finally got on the right path in her career. So when she learned that she was pregnant with her son, it threw everything off track again.
And to make matters worse, her son never slept through the night. He suffered from reflux and colic, and she said it nearly ruined her marriage:
I can honestly say it nearly broke my husband and I’s marriage apart. At one point, we didn’t sleep in the same bed with one another for months, because we had to take shifts sleeping at a friend or sibling’s home with the girls because he screamed that badly they couldn’t sleep. We tried numerous doctors, and nothing helped, we just had to wait for him to grow out of it.
She and her husband resented their son for so much, and she admitted they even wished horrible things on his health and considered adoption at one point. But how could she explain keeping two and giving away one?
She wrote:
I don’t want to be insensitive to anyone who has suffered a loss in this way, but I have to be honest, my husband and I both had a period where if he had of died in his sleep, we would have felt relief. At one point, I googled if we could still put him in the “baby hatches” our country has. He was too old. But again, how would we explain to everyone, including the girls, why we had a baby and then suddenly didn’t. I sobbed. I wished more than anything I realised I was pregnant earlier and could have had the abortion I wanted. I feel like my ability to bond with him was shot to hell by the fact he was just such a difficult baby. I honestly hated him for the first 18 months of his life.
Dislikemythird acknowledged on Reddit just how awful it sounded to say that she “hated” her own son and that while she loves spending time with her daughters and doing things with them, she only does things for her son because she has to:
Now he is three-and-a-half years old and even though he has now outgrown all that, and is pretty chill, I still just don’t like him. I am struggling to bond with him or even like him because I’m having trouble separating him from the memories of my marriage almost falling apart and my career being absolutely destroyed by having him and just the feelings that he was “forced” onto me by a birth control failure. My husband isn’t struggling to the same extent as I am, but has confessed he wishes our son “didn’t happen” because things were “better” before. Things have also been a lot more financially strained, and there he fact that we now have three kids to provide for and not two. Thankfully, we managed to save our marriage, but we both agree that we’d undo our son in a heartbeat if we could.
The Reddit user continued by saying she has visited two therapists since her son’s birth, and all of them simply told her to “fake it till she made it,” but that hasn’t worked in her.
Again, I am well aware I am going “mess him up” and he’ll grow up feeling like the least favorite child and all of that. I feel guilty about it and don’t want to feel this way, which is why I’m here.
Dislikemythird is hoping that by being honest about her feelings toward her son, she can get advice from someone who will make her feel differently about her son. She hates feeling this way and understands that he deserves better from her.