Actually Julie, from what you have shared I think your husband would benefit by seeing a therapist for himself. It could be and may very well be that your husband strayed simply because he was lonely with his challenged feelings and happened to come across someone that was sympathetic and that's really what he was drawn to. When the wife is giving all her compassion and attention to her children, the husband can begin to feel left out and get lonely and even depressed.

When you faced that challenge with your oldest child, you made it a point to research what that challenge meant so you could interact with this oldest and nurture and help with the navigation of dealing with that challenge. It was not an easy thing for you to navigate either, but, you want to be a good parent and you want to be there for this oldest the way that is needed. Your husband genuinely struggled with this challenge, and it contributed to his feeling powerless. His delay in using the right name and pronouns was showing that he was struggling with understanding this challenge, it frightened him and he was showing his unwillingness or discomfort with his own feelings. Actually, this is not all that different from how your youngest has gotten quiet and distant. And has not been connecting with his father the way he needs. You sense something is wrong and you sat and comforted him. You did something your husband doesn't know how to do and it can make him not only experience a sense of inadequacy, but also a bit of jealousy as well. And jealousy can mean seeing someone else handle something that you don't know how to handle but would like to, and also wishing someone would sit with you and help with how you feel and yet you feel left alone with how you feel. It's not all that different in what motivated you to reach out here to these forums. And that the responses you are getting are helping you to not feel so alone with all you are dealing with too.

You have been experiencing a lot of emotions with this challenge, totally understandable as you definitely have some challenges and you are at a loss of what to do and how to navigate forward. Well, this is how your husband has been feeling and it has made him unhappy and depressed and lonely which made him vulnerable to reaching out to the wrong place. However, as I mentioned, he has also spent time with his parents too. It's probable that he did that because he is hoping to find some sort of comfort there, a way of distancing himself because he is lost and doesn't know how to navigate all these challenges he is experiencing.

You have stepped back and you have been noticing things, signs your husband was straying in a way. Yet, when you think about the bigger picture, you have to look at everything because there is quite a bit there that you have been slowly sharing and unpacking here with members trying to support you with what you do share.

The thing about raising children Julie is that we are also raising them in a new generation too. Each generation presents changes that parents are not always quite ready for. As we are raising our children, we as parents are also still learning and growing too. We do not have all the answers and there are things we miss too. I know that when I was growing up in my generation, I never was exposed to what you and your husband are trying to deal with in your oldest. I have faced a lot of challenges, including infedility that I did not know how to navigate.

With each tier we face as we go through our lives, we face new challenges and truth be told, we are learning through our entire lives. When we are in our teens, we are learning about what it means to live in our teens and we tend to look at our piers and as we do that we are trying to learn how to navigate a variety of personalities and behaviors. We are also looking for ways to connect too because it's simply in our nature to do so. Then we face our twenties and we learn how to navigate that period in life, then we have to learn how to navigate our thirties which is different than our twenties, and then our fourties and by the time we hit our fifties, we go through changes in our bodies where we are becoming more aware of how much we are changing in ways that aint so great. And if we happen to have teenagers, we are now facing challenges where we have individuals that have opinions and needs and are becoming their own person too. And our teenagers are often in a very different kind of generation that we ourselves had not experienced. Often as they are trying to navigate, truth is so are we as the parent. (our teens tend to think we should JUST know and have the answers, but lets face it, we don't have all the answers)

Truth is, we can get so busy navigating the challenges we face that we can actually forget who we are too, that we somehow lost touch with who we are. It's also a bit different for men than it is for women too. Some couples get so busy they lose their connection with each other. It can be as if they live two separate lives, not even realizing it either yet it just seems to happen while they navigate their lives.

Well, you have been together for 33 years and navigated some of these tiers and it's now at a point where something new is taking place and a lot of couples experience this in some way. When feeding the emotions, one can make the mistake of throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak. It's one thing if your partner has not been there or loyal throughout the relationship, or you faced alcoholism or constant emotional abuse in some way, that can mean it's best to make a break. Yet, that's why it's important to take the time to unpack and examine the bigger picture. We can get to a tier in our lives that is more difficult than the rest, a period of confusion and questioning one's navigation, perhaps something needs to change that one doesn't know but feels the strain of. To assume a partner should "just" know is a mistake, because the truth is often a partner doesn't know and feels lost and lonely. This is when one needs to learn how to listen, as often it's expressed in a way that is missed and even the one struggling doesn't quite understand it either. We don't get to trade places with our partner, we can get so we don't really know our partner's personal challenges every day or their personal stresses or challenges they are struggling with but don't talk about very much. You say you let him have control of this or that, but what is it like to have those responsiblities? There are pressures and challenges we may not realize. And that's why a marriage counselor can help and get a couple to learn how to reconnect again or decide that there is not path to reconnection. It depends on the individuals and the history of their relationship.