Wife wants to have a baby in our 40s, I do not

I (42M) have been married to my wife (41F) for 20 years. We’ve been together since high school. Our son was born when she was 16 and I was 18. Totally unplanned and turned our worlds upside down but I think we can both agree that our son is the best thing that ever happened to us and despite how difficult it was at the time, I wouldn’t change how any of it happened now.

Our son (24) and his wife just had their first baby in November. A few weeks after they announced the pregnancy my wife started subtly making mention of how much she missed having a baby around, how cute little kids are, how different it’d be if we were to do it again at our current ages. I figured she was just really looking forward to a grandchild – you know, somebody she could buy things for and play with and then hand back off to mom and dad at the end of the day. After a few weeks of the subtle hinting she asked me if I’d consider having another baby now. Apparently she regrets never having another (he’s our only child, fyi).

I was honest and told her no. I don’t want to start over with another baby in my 40s. Our kid is 24 years old and has a baby of his own! We didn’t have more children years ago when we were younger because we spent the first 10 years of his life just trying to get by and then to eventually catch up to our peers. It took us a little longer to finish college, to buy our first home, etc. but we got there eventually. Having a kid so young made us get serious about things like real jobs and motivated us to try to advance in our careers much quicker than we probably would have otherwise. My wife has gone back and gotten 2 more degrees over the years. Eventually once our son was about 10-12 we talked about it decided we were happy with the way things were and didn’t want to start over with a baby at that point. I’m proud to say that we worked so hot and planned so well that we’re now in a much better position than most of our friends our age AND while most of our friends still have young kids at home ours is grown and doing well and we are young enough to now be able to enjoy all that we’ve worked for. To me, this should be our time to finally enjoy ourselves, to go on vacations just the two of us, to buy ourselves a few nice things, to have adult only time all the time!

To my wife, I’m being a selfish asshole who won’t consider her feelings. She hasn’t been talking about having a baby for years or anything like that, mind you. She starts talking about it out of the blue and suddenly I’m the bad guy because I don’t want to have a baby now?

And that’s how it started. She then practically refused to have sex with me for 3 months because I wouldn’t give her a baby. Before this, our sex life was good – often, spontaneous, varied, she initiated probably 30% of the time. There was a definitely big boost to our sex life about 4 years ago when our son was basically completely out of the house. My wife started working out more, taking more time for herself, and her libido really seemed to increase and I wasn’t about to complain. So this was all still going on until the baby talk. Now she just mopes and avoids most physical interactions with me. She still has a sex drive because she masturbates regularly. She tells me she’s doing it and is punishing me. The times where she has agreed to actual sex it seems to be going great but then she’ll ask if I’ll give her a baby or some similar comment and I say no and then she gets mad. A few times I’ve actually just played along with it so she wouldn’t get mad and stop right before we reach the best part, but anymore I don’t even want to have sex with her because she’s going to bring it up midway through the action and honestly it’s a total mood killer for me.

She then had a health scare (which eventually turned out to be nothing, thankfully). She became more like her regular self for a while after that. I was almost at the point of agreeing to another baby because she had managed to make me feel so bad about it and in my mind I had made all sorts of negotiations like “please just let her not be dying of a fatal disease and I’ll give her the baby she wants.” The health scare shocked her and put her off of the baby idea for about a month afterwards. She said she was “over it” and “too old.” I was relieved. Then, it started again – the constant talk about babies being peppered into our daily conversations, the refusing sex as a blackmail technique. I do still love her very much, but this baby issue is driving a giant wedge between us. The people who know about it told me months ago that’s she’s get over it, that she’d meet her new grandchild and be so over the moon about being a grandma that she’d totally forget about wanting to be a mom to her own newborn. Nope, that’s not happened at all. Oh she loves that baby but it’s only made her want one of her own even more.

She does stay in her lane as grandma. She knows it’s their baby and she’s not the parent – she’s not a nutcase who wants to abduct her grandchild or tell our son and DIL how to raise their child. I feel like I have to make this clear. She seems perfectly fine mentally and I don’t believe she’s having any sort of mental or emotional problems bringing this desire one (something some people have suggested, but no I really don’t think so).

I’d like to know if anyone sees a way where we can meet in the middle and both find a way to be happy here, but I really don’t think there’s any way to compromise when it comes to this situation. I’m about at the point where I’m going to give in and agree to have another kid because I don’t want to continue on the way things have been going and I also don’t want her to hold this against me for the rest of our lives. She’d be very happy and I know that if we did have another kid that I’d love him/her even if it’s not how I pictured this time in my life. So I’m asking some internet strangers to tell me what you’d do here.

TL;DR: My (M42) wife (F41) is being very stubborn over her desire to have a baby and I’m about to give in and want to know what internet strangers would do in my shoes.