metaphortunate son (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
metaphortunate) wrote2013-06-26 08:31 pm
metaphortunate) wrote2013-06-26 08:31 pm
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mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be mamas
Don't have kids, guys.
Seriously. Just don't do it. Have long lazy afternoons puttering around. Have inventive, acrobatic, energetic sex that you're not too tired for and don't have to get finished before the baby wakes up. Have good relationships where you can pay attention to each other. Have relaxed lazy evenings in bars with friends and interesting cocktails. Have a career you can put your heart and soul into. Have hobbies. Have political interests that you can do work on. Have good friends, that you can stay close to. Have conversations that don't get interrupted four times a minute. Have parties. Go to parties and don't leave at 7. Go to parties that don't cost $60 for the babysitter. Go on planes and don't spend fifteen hours with someone crying and trying to climb up you by hanging on to your nipples. Don't spend your life wiping poop. Don't spend your life wiping noses. Don't spend your life wiping someone else endlessly. For the love of god, don't put yourself through pregnancy. Don't fill your house with plastic crap. Don't fill your life with worry about whether the baby's doing all right and getting everything it needs. Don't shift yourself down to about #12 on your own list of priorities. Don't get yourself stuck in a situation good and hard. Don't spend all your time having to tell someone "no" literally every 2 minutes, all day, every day. Don't spend all your time fighting with someone about every single thing that has to get done in a day, from going up stairs to eating dinner. Don't do it. I'm telling you: don't have kids. Let other people send you pictures of their kids and feel a bit wistful about it, before you move on to your latest book or TV show or project or pet or trip or job or nap. Have a life. Have love. Have yourself.
The Junebug continues to be wonderful and adorable. He continues to be the easiest baby ever. I don't regret having him. But I can sort of tell that I can't. It's not biologically possible right now, apparently. Which I'm sure is for the best. But if you haven't gotten yourself into this yet? Run. Run now. Run away from anything that might get you into this and never look back.
Seriously. Just don't do it. Have long lazy afternoons puttering around. Have inventive, acrobatic, energetic sex that you're not too tired for and don't have to get finished before the baby wakes up. Have good relationships where you can pay attention to each other. Have relaxed lazy evenings in bars with friends and interesting cocktails. Have a career you can put your heart and soul into. Have hobbies. Have political interests that you can do work on. Have good friends, that you can stay close to. Have conversations that don't get interrupted four times a minute. Have parties. Go to parties and don't leave at 7. Go to parties that don't cost $60 for the babysitter. Go on planes and don't spend fifteen hours with someone crying and trying to climb up you by hanging on to your nipples. Don't spend your life wiping poop. Don't spend your life wiping noses. Don't spend your life wiping someone else endlessly. For the love of god, don't put yourself through pregnancy. Don't fill your house with plastic crap. Don't fill your life with worry about whether the baby's doing all right and getting everything it needs. Don't shift yourself down to about #12 on your own list of priorities. Don't get yourself stuck in a situation good and hard. Don't spend all your time having to tell someone "no" literally every 2 minutes, all day, every day. Don't spend all your time fighting with someone about every single thing that has to get done in a day, from going up stairs to eating dinner. Don't do it. I'm telling you: don't have kids. Let other people send you pictures of their kids and feel a bit wistful about it, before you move on to your latest book or TV show or project or pet or trip or job or nap. Have a life. Have love. Have yourself.
The Junebug continues to be wonderful and adorable. He continues to be the easiest baby ever. I don't regret having him. But I can sort of tell that I can't. It's not biologically possible right now, apparently. Which I'm sure is for the best. But if you haven't gotten yourself into this yet? Run. Run now. Run away from anything that might get you into this and never look back.
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Also, if you do manage to have one, definitely don't have more. It doesn't actually gt easier. Oh, sure, they'll light up your heart in all kinds of new and exciting ways, but they'll also tear it to bit in new and exciting ways, and that's to say nothing of anything you ever owned or thought to be important.
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(Also holy spelling errors in that original comment Batman - *get, *bits)
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-J
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-J
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2) Nor should you feel superior.
It really keeps coming back to that poem for me. I feel okay about giving the advice I gave because it is useless. You already know about the Yes or the No that you have in you to this question. So do I. It doesn't reduce the price of the answer. I'm paying mine, it is a high price. It is the answer that I had in me to give, though. I don't want your pity; I want your seat on the bus, and maybe a smile for the baby, and honestly, for you to maybe take a moment to extra appreciate the joys of the choice you made. They're good joys! They should be enjoyed. :)
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-J
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Seriously, I refused to have a baby with that man because his parents were so insane and he refused to get any help. In times of emergency or horror, I cheer myself up by thinking, "Although I have to deal with these seventeen crises, at least I am not also dealing with my husband's reaction to any of them. Or his mother's. Or his father's" although my father-in-law was dead before I left my marriage.
How crazy were they? When the grandkids (aged 4 and 2) got slightly different toys in their gift baskets, my MIL stole the "better" toy from the younger child to give to the older one. In her world, the oldest child (like her) must always have the best -- she was quite open about it. Which explains why she was so nasty to her second-born, my husband. I knew the nastiness would be spread to our kids.
Anyway, this started out as a celebration of the joys inherent in each decision, not an explanation of my weird in-laws.
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Chronic fatigue + chronic pain + kids... I just wouldn't be able to cope.
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So don't get married, it'll drive you round the bend
It's the lane without a turning, it's the end without an end
Change your lover every Friday, take up tennis, be a nurse
But don't get married, girls, for marriage is a curse
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-J
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But I don't want any of my own, and realizing that means there's not even any wistfulness, just joy that other people are making different decisions to me.
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But it's definitely making me stronger. Just like weightlifting: I'm getting stronger by doing hard and painful things, repeatedly, to the limit of my current ability, usually when I'd rather be doing something easy or eating cake. I like the strength. It is a positive transformation. But the process of acquiring it is brutal.
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Seriously, this. This is what I'm learning: becoming a parent is *always* a radical transformation... and if you wait until you have a happy marriage and a fulfilling career and an enjoyable social life and all those great things... THEY GET TRANSFORMED. They are not the same! And that's a real loss that weighs against all the other things that you gain.
If you become a parent when your life is less formed, less fulfilled, more burdened with troubles... yeah, there's a real possibility that you're going to crash and burn. But it's also possible that this wild infusion of beauty and power and meaning is going to fuel you to make changes and reach goals that you weren't even dreaming of before. We see that a lot. We're not just there to prevent the crashing-and-burning, we're there to facilitate and celebrate the transformation.
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Well, actually at least at some point he will start wiping his own poop! That will no longer be your job!
I think at some point every parent feels this and it's the flip side to the joys of parenting -- it's just inevitable when you do it. Only half-humourously, this is why I have cats.
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(It took me quite a while to even consider having a second child, for the reasons in your post. I would not give the same advice, but I certainly sympathize with the feelings prompting it.)
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I would not be pregnant again right now if I weren't staring down the barrel of 40, for real. I would have taken longer to think about it.
That being said, tonight both the Junebug and Mr. E seem to have entered into a conspiracy to be improbably delightful. Sometimes I do get what I need when I need it. Yay.
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Of course, if we took at all seriously the costs of being a parent (OK, let's be honest, mostly I mean being a mother), then we'd have to consider ways to change it, and an awful lot of people have an awful lot to gain from considering motherhood an unchangeable product of nature rather than a thing that's socially constructed like everything else.
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Part of the decision to have a kid was choosing to grit my teeth and accept that the social construction of motherhood is still remarkably terrible and yet my choice was take it or leave it; I was not going to be able to wait for the world to get better to be a mother in.
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TRAUMATIC. Which one of us does she wish unborn? :( (Answer: none, obv, but we understandably make her tired.)
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This is why it's so important for moms to be able to bitch to people who aren't their kids! When they don't have that, their kids are who it ends up coming out to!
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Because I heard those facts you set out from my mother.
Pretty much ensured I wouldn't have kids, and that I got away from her as fast as I could.
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Seriously, though, I think my sister starting to have kids when I was 12 (she's 15 years older than me) has been a huge influence on my whole attitude towards kids, which is basically, "Yeah, no."
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