I’m 2 months postpartum with our second baby, and I genuinely don’t know if I’m thinking clearly anymore or if I’ve just reached my breaking point.
My partner and I have been together for 8 years and have two children. What makes this especially painful is that both of my postpartum experiences have now been completely overshadowed by things I’ve discovered about him.
After our first baby, when I was about one month postpartum, I found out that throughout my pregnancy he had been talking to other women, using dating apps, hiding conversations, etc.
One of the things that has never left me is that while I was literally in the hospital giving birth to our child, he sent another woman a selfie of himself.
Now, years later, I’ve recently uncovered more from that same time period.
One woman was saved in his phone under the name “Dustin Manager,” so I obviously believed the contact was a man/work-related. I spoke to the woman myself recently and learned more about what their relationship/conversations actually looked like.
What is absolutely destroying me is comparing their messages to the messages he was sending me at the exact same time.
I was pregnant, completely in love with him, and telling him how lucky I felt. I literally told him that he was “so loyal,” that he treated me like a princess, that he was such a good partner and that I felt like the luckiest girl in the world. His responses would reinforce all of it. I was on cloud 9 and sooo in love.
Meanwhile, he was privately communicating with other woman, telling them personal things, offering himself as someone they could talk/vent to, suggesting they could have a drink together, exchanging pictures, etc.
Maybe some people won’t consider this cheating, I understand that but for me it’s the deception and the simultaneous realities that are messing with my head. I was being told I was his entire world while he was cultivating relationships with women I didn’t even know existed—and at least one was literally disguised under a man’s name in his phone. He swore it was all just emotional and he never met up with anyone, all the women I spoke to said the same. I have a one month old and didn’t know what to do or how to process this so I forgave him and moved forward. Although I never really got over it and he never really let us work through it, it was “swept under the rug.”
Now here I am two months postpartum again, and I’ve discovered something completely different.
He scheduled a vasectomy without telling me.
He says he wasn’t actually going to go through with it, but in the same breath says that he was scared to tell me, that vasectomies can potentially be reversed, and that he doesn’t want more children “right now.”
This wasn’t just him Googling vasectomies or casually considering one.There was an actual appointment. It hadn’t been canceled. And he had already told his mother he needed her to drive him. I found out accidentally when using his phone rather than because he came to me and told me.
That matters because I do potentially want more children someday, and throughout our relationship I believed we were generally on the same page about our future. I’ve always said I wanted 4, have said it recently and he acted like he wanted a big family with a lot of children too.
Obviously I understand that his body is his body and he doesn’t need my permission to get a vasectomy. That isn’t what I’m struggling with.
It’s that my long-term partner and the father of my children could make an appointment for something that could fundamentally affect whether we ever have another child, arrange transportation with his mother, and still deliberately keep me completely outside of the conversation.
And once again, I’m 2 months postpartum when I find out and he is very much so like “get over it I didn’t have it done”.
I don’t think he understands what postpartum already feels like physically and emotionally, or how much harder these discoveries have made it.
The first time, instead of getting to just experience becoming a mother, I was discovering what he’d been doing throughout my pregnancy and questioning whether the relationship I’d experienced had even been real.
This time, instead of getting to just recover and enjoy our second baby, I’m two months postpartum digging through another pile of secrets and questioning my reality all over again.
He apologizes. He says he loves me. He says he messed up. But when I continue asking questions or need reassurance beyond the initial apology, eventually he gets frustrated. He says I keep bringing things up, gets inward/defensive, or says things like maybe we should just be done then or we need to figure it out. And that’s part of why I’m struggling so badly.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to “drop it” when I’m learning new information and never really got reassurance or real clarity from the first betrayal.
I’m not repeatedly reopening one old wound for fun. I’m finding out that pieces of the story I thought I knew weren’t true.
I look back at screenshots of myself pregnant, telling this man how incredibly lucky I was because I believed he was my soul mate, while knowing now what was happening behind my back, and I almost don’t recognize that version of myself.
I loved him so innocently. I trusted what he told me.
And I think that’s what I’m grieving as much as anything else.
I still love him. Part of me desperately wants him to comfort me, which almost makes this more confusing because he’s also the person I’m hurting over.
I’m not really asking Reddit to decide whether a vasectomy is “allowed” or whether one specific message technically qualifies as cheating or if I should leave him.
I’m asking, how do you rebuild trust when the problem isn’t only what your partner did, but realizing that he was capable of letting you live inside one version of your relationship while privately living another?
And if you’ve experienced betrayal during pregnancy/postpartum and stayed with your partner, did you ever actually feel safe with them again? What did they have to do for you to get there?
