Dear Prudence,
My husband and I agreed that we didn’t want to have kids. But last year, we said yes when someone in his family needed us as foster parents. I’d like to think that I was an OK foster mom: I made her my first priority and understood that our life was going to be organized around her. It turned out that her mom was in active addiction during pregnancy so she had more medical needs and troubles than most babies. It was not a radical or transformative experience with love, empathy, and bonding. It was an anxious, sleepless slog for a kid who needed it.
I felt like my husband passed the hardest parts off to me: all of the nighttime care, the daycare problems, the more painful doctor appointments, or the annoying social services bureaucracy. We fought about it but it never really got better. We only had her for six months but it was the longest six months ever.
My husband was heartbroken when it was time but I mostly felt relief when it was safe for her to return to her birth mom. Our monthly visits are perfect for me. We’d been together for 15 years and married for a decade but I suddenly saw all these cracks and selfishness within my husband that I’d never seen before. I’m still angry with him and I don’t know what to do—our marriage is back to feeling sweet and balanced but I can’t forget this nightmare experience. Part of me says this is a clue for how he’ll treat me badly if we grow old together and part of me says it was an experience we’d never had before and will never have again. What do I do here?
—Open Eyes