I (38M) have been with my Wife, Skye (38F) for almost 16 years. In that time we have gotten married and have had three children together, one boy Allen jr (13), and twin girls Bella and Luna (12). For some background me and my wife have been very happy for our relationship, I work and pay the bills, and she stays home and takes care of our three children. I never wanted children, however, it was her dream to be a mother. As you can tell from the title my wife is a transgender woman, she is not able to have her own children biologically so we opted to use my sperm and go through a surrogate. All three of our children have the same biological mother and father, but skye has been their mom in every practical sense from the moment they were born. Ironically Skye and I live a pretty conservative lifestyle, none of my family knows of her background and neither do the children, they were just all told that Skye was suffering from infertility and surrogacy was the best option for us. Our children have never looked at their mother any differently and neither has my family. As a White collar worker, most of my days are spent at work with Skye at home with the children and taking care of the house with things such as cleaning, laundry, meals, taking the kids to extra curriculars etc.. we typically spend the weekends together as a family whether it’s family game nights, or going to the lake house for the weekend and fishing,hiking etc. this has been our life for the last 15 years.

My wife has always been the most beautiful woman that I know, she passes extremely well for a trans woman, and we’ve been together so long I was able to be there to support her through the healing of all her major transition procedures. She truly is a brilliant woman and a brilliant wife, it’s as if she lives to please me. The issue that’s now arising is entirely my fault and I’ve been able to see that through undergoing extensive therapy in the last two months. Almost a year into our relationship Skye found out that I was having an affair with my ex, it almost destroyed us, but I begged her to stay with me and give me another chance. Skye agreed to stay, but she let me know if anything like that was to ever happen again she would leave me no questions asked. We got better, got married a couple years later and have had a great life since then, until about a year ago. While visiting my parents I bumped into this ex at a park with our children, we were polite but didn’t do or say anything that I felt was crossing a line. The next week when we were back home I noticed I had a message request on Facebook from this ex, I figured it was weird but nothing bad could come out of harmless text messages. Overtime the messages became less and less harmless, as we realized the initial spark we felt all those years ago were still there, we began to say we love each other, and talk nonstop pretty much everyday when I wasn’t home with my wife. It was always over text or call, we never got to the physical point but that’s not to say things wouldn’t have if we lived closer to each other.

Around three months ago, my wife went through my phone while I was sleeping and found everything. She found all our messages, phone calls, any communication going back for nearly 8 months. She woke me up and asked me what it was, honestly I panicked, I blew up and screamed at her for going through my phone. She just looked at me and cried. That night I listened to my wife silently cry in bed for hours until I got up to leave for work. The weeks after that were hell, it was like watching the person I loved all my life slowly die and lose themself. She quit speaking to me entirely, she quit washing my clothes, she quit making sure dinner was warm when I was off work, she never let the kids know that anything was wrong, she continued to be an amazing mother to them but she was soo cold to me. I also noticed after a week that she was self harming again, a habit I haven’t seen from her since before our first child was born. I finally broke down and begged her to talk to me, I was on my knees crying just begging to fix our family and all my wife managed to do was whisper out that she wanted a divorce. My entire life shattered in front of my face. My wife has always been true to her word and I was served with divorce papers the next week. She’s been sleeping in a separate room since but we’ve stayed living together for our children.

Over the last couple months I’ve done everything I can to win her love back, I’m constantly buying her gifts and flowers, I’ve started therapy and she’s even went a few sessions with me, I’ve given her access to all my social media and all my messages. I realize I made a huge mistake and just want my life back but she’s heartless now and she’s not budging. She’s planning to move into an apartment next month, and she’s informed me she still wants the divorce and she plans to split the custody of the children. I just want my family back and now she means to take my children away from me too. I feel it is unfair if she gets 50% custody because the children are not biologically related to her at all, I am wanting to fight her for full custody. If she wants to give up on our family that is fine, and I recognize my mistakes, but she cannot just take away my children from me. Our children are not stupid, they definitely recognize me and their mother are having issues right now but they don’t know the severity of them. I’ve read a lot of these stories on Reddit and never thought that I would have to be the one posting them. I’m here asking for advice, I know I was wrong for cheating, but is there anything I can do to get my wife back, and if it comes down to divorce aita for fighting for full custody even though they are not her children biologically? I know I’m going to get a lot of hate in these replies, I’ve failed as a husband, but I don’t feel that gives her a right to take children that aren’t even related to her, it feels malicious as if she’s just trying to harm me more now.