[RobMoney$]

**SERIOUS POST ALERT**



I've had a vasectomy.

I won't attempt to offer any advice one way or the other, but I will share my story and experience.
If it helps you, that's great.

I was 23yo when I made the decision to have it done. I was married to a beautiful woman, inside & out. The girl of my dreams. Couldn't imagine ever being apart from her. It just didn't even enter the thought process.
We loved each other like WHOA!

She had a son from a previous relationship who I loved and was raising as my own. We had a daughter together. Three months after she was born my wife became pregnant with our son. He was born almost exactly a year later.
I found myself being 22yo father raising and supporting three kids.
I had left school to take a full-time position to support my family.
Times were kinda tough, but we were all very happy.
My wife and I discussed options for preventing another pregnancy at this point. We both figured we would be together forever, and now we both had a son and a daughter. What more could you want, right? We didn't want or we couldn't afford anymore. We discussed having her tubes tied, but quickly came to understand that me having a vasectomy was much simplier, so I agreed to get it done.
I had to convince the urologist to do the proceedure. He didn't want to do it at first because I was so young.

A few months after my son was born he began exhibiting some peculiar behaviors for a child his age. My wife insisted he was fine. He went to the doctor for his regular checkups and his height and weight were always fine for his age. Blood work, shots, and everything always went fine. But by the time he was about 2.5 I had finally convinced my wife to let me take him to be evaluated at childrens hospital. The behavior specialist took about 2 minutes to determine that our son was autistic. He exhibited all the textbook behaviors and symptoms. Looking back on the day he was born I knew there was something different about him the minute he was born. I could just tell, I can't explain it, I just felt it. My wife and I both began regretting our decision to not have anymore kids.

By about the time my kids were about 8-10 years old my wife began having mental issues herself. She was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and manic depressive. She was admitted and released from mental hospitals half a dozen times in about a year. Our marriage obviously fell apart as she became ill and wanted no part of her kids or me. I watched the woman I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with degrade into insanity and become someone very sad and scary. I was left to raise my kids on my own and she moved back with her mother in between even more stays in the hospital.

After a few years of being a single parent I met someone via this very message board. We began an relationship and eventually moved in together. My kids grew to love her and look to her as a mother figure. Our relationship was good, but one of the issues we had to contend with was the fact that she wanted kids of her own very much. Although it is something I made her aware of very early in our relationship, we both ignored it in the begining. But the older she got, the more she started seeing the clock ticking away for her to have children. We discussed having my vasectomy reversed. We even discussed adoption. Both were alternatives we couldn't afford (both were about $10k). And starting over with another child was not really something I wanted to do at that point in life anyway. I can't say it was the only reason we broke up, but it was one of the reasons. It definitely led to a lot of disagreements and tension in the relationship.

I've luckily managed to meet a great girl who doesn't want kids, and doesn't think she can have them anyway. So my being snipped will hopefully never become an issue.

So in my experience, I'm not sure if I had the opportunity to go back and change my decision, if I would. At some points in my life, getting snipped was the right choice. Then at a later point in life it became a hinderence.
Life takes you places you never think you'd wind up in a million years.
I thought I was going to get married, raise my kids, have the dream family with the dream house.
Nobody ever thinks they're gonna wake up at almost 40yo, Divorced, single father of a special needs child, and just hoping I may have just found someone who could come close to the love I once felt for my wife.