My husband insisted on having a third child – it’s wrecked our marriage

According to the latest ONS data, raising a child can cost over £500,000 for families using full-time childcare and private schooling. Even where parents use state education and no formal childcare, the total still reaches more than £143,000. Here, one woman describes the personal and professional cost of having a third child, how it has put a strain on her marriage and the guilt she feels for regretting a child she adores. Interview by Cath Renton. I know what it’s like to desperately want a baby and not be able to have one, so the fact that I regret having a third child feels shocking to me. My husband James* and I spent £8,000 on IVF to have our second child, and as far as I was concerned, our family was complete. But James persuaded me to have a third, and it’s a decision that’s made me resent him every day since. Our youngest daughter, Emily*, is two. She’s hilarious, stubborn and incredibly loving. I adore her, but I regret what having her has done to my life. My marriage has suffered, my work has too, and I feel like I’ve been in a state of permanent exhaustion since she arrived. Shorts When I met James in my late twenties, he told me almost immediately that he wanted “a house full of children”. He is one of four and loved growing up in a noisy family. I have one brother and always imagined I’d probably have two children. When our first daughter, Grace*, arrived relatively easily 10 years ago, James was ecstatic. “So that’s number one of four,” he joked in the delivery room. I laughed, not thinking he was serious. When we started trying for another baby two years later, nothing happened. Months became a year. A year became two. There were tests, appointments and eventually that horrible phrase: secondary infertility. Every pregnancy announcement felt like a knife to the gut. I’d smile at friends while they showed me scan pictures, then cry in the car afterwards. Meanwhile, James remained determined that we’d have another child. Eventually, we turned to IVF. Anyone who has been through fertility treatment knows how completely it can consume you. Our lives revolved around injections, blood tests, scans and phone calls. I became obsessed with becoming pregnant again, and worried about the financial impact on the family if we had to go through multiple rounds of treatment. Our first round failed, and I was devastated. The second one failed too, and I told James: “We stop at three rounds. I can’t keep doing this.” Thankfully, on the third round, we got our son Oliver*. The day I saw his heartbeat on the scan, I sobbed. When Oliver was born and he was placed on my chest, I remember thinking: “I will never ask life for anything again.” We had our girl and our boy. After everything we’d been through, I felt so unbelievably fortunate. And, importantly, I felt finished; our family was complete. Oliver was about two when James started talking seriously about number three. At first, I laughed it off. “We’ve only just got our lives back,” I’d say. But he kept mentioning it. His vision was always 30 years into the future: us at a huge table surrounded by children and grandchildren. My vision was rather more immediate. Another maternity leave. More years of nappies and broken sleep. I was approaching 40, and I didn’t want to start again. And, if I am being completely honest, I didn’t really want a third child. Two kids felt manageable; three felt like chaos. But James was persistent. He wasn’t bullying me, but there was pressure. He’d say: “Imagine if we regret not doing it,” or, “We’ve got so much love to give.” I told him I wouldn’t go through IVF again, but we could try the old-fashioned way, and James agreed. I thought, deep down, that I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant naturally, and James would eventually let it go. Ironically, after all the treatment we’d needed to conceive Oliver, I became pregnant naturally within four months. When the test was positive, my initial reaction wasn’t joy; it was terror. As soon as I told James, he burst into tears and hugged me. I smiled and cried too. But they weren’t happy tears. After a relatively straightforward pregnancy, despite my status as a “geriatric” mother at 40, I was elated when Emily arrived into the world two years ago. Swept up in the post-birth hormonal bubble, I put the fears I had about expanding our family aside and fell in love hard with our little girl. But the postpartum period was really rough. Emily barely slept and wanted to be held constantly. She refused bottles, which meant I couldn’t leave her for more than a couple of hours. I felt like I was a terrible mother to Grace and Oliver, who fought each other and me for attention. I was being pulled in too many directions and hanging by a thread mentally. Adding another child changed the entire structure of our family. With two children, we could divide and conquer. With three, someone was always waiting, someone was always being ignored, and someone was always shouting “Mummy!” while I was dealing with somebody else. Instead of helping, James started working longer hours, under the guise of helping us out financially, but I think, deep down, he just wanted to avoid the mayhem at home. Before Emily, I had gone back to work four days a week and had been discussing a promotion. Then nursery fees returned, my working hours dropped, and our savings disappeared far faster than I expected. James has progressed in his career, but I haven’t. And although I agreed to have Emily, a part of me thinks: “You wanted three children, but I’m the one who paid the higher price.” He didn’t endure pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding. He isn’t the one who has to leave work early when nursery or school called about a sick child. There are evenings when the children are fighting, the kitchen is a disaster, and I’ll feel a flash of fury towards James. Once, after a particularly awful weekend, I snapped: “I told you I didn’t want another.” He went completely silent, then said: “Are you saying you wish we didn’t have Emily?” “No,” I said immediately. Because the truthful answer was more complicated. I look at my daughter and feel overwhelming love. But I also feel regret. If I could go back to the night James first seriously suggested another baby, I would say: “No. We’re done.” I would trust the tiny voice inside me that already knew two children were enough. I sometimes wonder whether it’s easier for him to love the chaos because it hasn’t cost him as much. His career has thrived. He doesn’t look in the mirror and see a body ravaged by three pregnancies. He doesn’t take on any of the emotional labour, despite my begging him to help more. Sometimes, the guilt I feel for regretting agreeing to a third child almost crushes me. I tell Emily she was one of the best things that ever happened to me. And somehow, impossibly, that can be true at exactly the same time as this: if I had my life again, I’d have stopped at two. *Names have been changed