chiron

Very carefully, I have read your post several times. I have thought about the many areas you have covered, with differing reactions each time I have read your concerns.

Although I can understand your marital and personal problems regarding a husband's promiscuous one-night stand some twelve years ago during a pregnancy, and the current affectation with pornography, I do think you are selling yourself short as you near the half-century mark.

No one can make you feel worth-less, unless you yourself buy into that attitude in regards to your sense of personal well-being and self-esteem, as person and personality, wife and mother of two daughters.

You speak of being in competition with beautiful scantily clad women; when in fact, computer graphics are but resolutions composed of pixels re-presenting images of women posing and posturing in provacative ways. The same may be said of the Playboy channel as a past event.

These electronic illusions can be turned on and off at will. In no way are these images "alive" and "real" as your competition, unless you are in competition for your husband's affectation or attention?

Your concerns remind me of what I went through with my mother when I entered adolescence. Granted, the relationship is different, mother-son, as opposed to husband-wife-daughters, but the demanding and controlling nature that I sense in your personal disappointment stikes me as being similar in context and content.

The fact that you have two daughters, one of which is twelve, may be the underlying motivation for your personal discontent and disillusionment. Mothers and daughers are often seen to be involved in major conflicts of interest and competition with each other when adolescence strikes in a hormonal way.

Essentially, you and your daughters are at opposite ends of the spectrum of a woman's biological reproductive cycle. Scantily clad women are nothing new in any man-husband's household with wife and daughters.

A woman's world is a fact of life with mothers and daughters. Candidly considered, I think you are trying to make an equation between husband, promiscuity, prostitution-pornography, adolescent daughters, and pregnancy.

Barbara Streisand illustrated a case example of this equation in the 1987 film "Nuts," as a coming of age scenario. The crux of the court issue was a step-father/mother problem.