Entry 1926 -- Eureka! I see the light!

Guest, I have heard the exact same thing from breeders of how I must think I am so better than them since I chose a childfree lifestyle. Insecure people judge a person's outsides by their own inside feelings. I know...because I have done the same when feeling low about myself. I did that last year with a male friend who is very wealthy due to career success. It took almost a year to realise that *I* was the jerk even though some things were not what I thought they were....assumptions and lack of communication are like two forms of dynamite set off together. I was able to make amends and have a friend again. The people with children who try to devalue your self-worth do this because THEY only want to drag you down as you mention in the post. Your male boss is angry that you can "get away" with not having those babies. A lot of parents have those resentments because they are secretly angry that THEY were unable to "get away with it".

That post was good to read, wasn't it? I wanted to pump my fist in the air when I read it. (And I needed a pick me up after I read the post before it. What a bummer post that was.)

I've heard stuff like this too. What the hell is wrong with breeders? You know, if someone truly wants to have a child, that's one thing, but breeders want to push children on everyone, regardless of whether they are interested. They feel they have to guilt and pressure women into being moothers and tell them they are less than others. It's just wrong.

bell_flower Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That post was good to read, wasn't it? I wanted
> to pump my fist in the air when I read it. (And I
> needed a pick me up after I read the post before
> it. What a bummer post that was.)
>
> I've heard stuff like this too. What the hell is
> wrong with breeders? You know, if someone truly
> wants to have a child, that's one thing, but
> breeders want to push children on everyone,
> regardless of whether they are interested. They
> feel they have to guilt and pressure women into
> being moothers and tell them they are less than
> others. It's just wrong.

I loved reading this post!This is something I have felt so many times.

Bell_Flower, you are 100% correct that it is one thing is a person truly wants to have a child. Women are constantly being "guilted" for not wanting those babies. I am a hard person to push guilt on, though. It is very difficult to book me on those "Guilt Trips"...even if you offer me a first class ticket!

People fear a childfree-by-choice female more than they do a male who chooses the same path. A CF woman symbolizes a female who may be harder to control. That feeds on people's insecurities. It is all about their own issues rather than our choices.

Back to the fallout with the friend last year...

I can attest that this was about MY issues about wealthy people. Some of it was because of how my former husband and his family treated me. However, the argument was mostly about my own junk-in-my-head and stupid assumptions about those with money.

It goes back to those attacking us having their own issues. I know that it is usually ME who is out-of-whack if I feel I must attack another person's choices and values to make MYSELF feel better. This is why I try to think before speaking or acting out as well as working on being a better person. Although mootherhood is not MY path, I will not insult another woman for being a parent even if her kid in a store or other public place is acting like a terror.

Same goes for those who live a more lavish lifestyle than the one I lead: one of trying to consciously be more austere and less of a consumer. My life's choices are not better than someone elses...just different. I hate consumerism and X-mas but I cannot fault another for finding joy im these activities...despite writing a letter to a magazine about this issue -- something I will not do again.

This is stuff that I did not learn overnight and am still learning...

The problem with my extended family (i.e. cousins) who live in Brazil is that they have this old-fashion mentality that damn children are necessary in a marriage. DH and I absolutely do not want any brats. One cousin said that she doesn't like kids that much, but would like to have at least one with her husband who wants really two brats because children are part of a marriage. PUKE!! Another older cousin who have two grown adult children commented the other day via instant messanger when I said that DH and I enjoy our independence and that children are probelmatic and cause tons of expenses. He turned around and said, but they are a complement of someone and that they take care of you when you are old. PUKE!! This cousin supports his son who is 31 and who is a student living in Europe and also helps out financially his daughter who is 33 and who is married and has always been high maintenance with everything name-brand and ultra in style, etc.. He even bought her a suite in a ritzy area where she has her private practice as a psychologist. I just ignore these stupid comments. Another cousin of mine said the same bullshit that kids are a necessity in a marriage. This cousin was forced to marry the girlfriend he knocked-up and is having a lot of financial difficuly! His father-in-law had to buy him and the moo wifey a used car and put a down-payment on a condo becuase my cousin is the only one who works and the wife is a SAHMoo. When we took online all he doesn't his send stupid photos of his brat and barely talks about anything inteligent. He told me that the it was Children's Day (October 12) in Brazil and that he took his 10 month old brat to an amusement park to celebrate! GAG ME!! First of all you don't have to be married to be a moo or a duh and second of all a brat is never a completment to anybody, but a money sucking monster that robs your independence and freedom away. Thank God these people live out of the country and I don't have to deal with them often!

Most cultures, even our supposed modern Western culture, believes that children hold a marriage together and that breeding is really the only purpose for two people to get married. I am not a fan of marriage after another one gone South. I have also seen the reality of most people's unions after public smiling faces & testaments of how their marriage is so....different...so it is not just me.

However, children-in-the-mix tends to make most marriages worse. I do feel the childfree-by-choice have just as high of a divorce rate as those with children. Yet, it seems that I see MORE divorced parents out there. Anytime a third party is invited into any relationship, the union suffers. In-laws can do enough damage to the marriage of a childfree-by-choice person without adding the hassles of sprogs who are there every-freaking-day! Kids are geniuses when it comes to playing parents against each other when it comes to rules and discipline. I've seen how that causes tons of arguments between the couple.

The "who will visit you when you are old" is so trite and tired. Guest, like your cousin's situation, many of today's parents are the ones who are supporting their adult children rather than the other way around. I hate to admit how my generation (I'm 42) and the next one down are very high-maintenance. Our parents are more solvent than their parents were so my and the next generation got more things at an earlier age than my mom or grandma. This led to the Boomerang Generation where the grown "kids" never leave home or come back as well as financially depending on Mom & Dad.

A friend of mine, another childfree lady, met a woman in her fifties who said she was very strong about not wanting those babies as a young person. Sadly, this older woman wishes she had changed her mind because of the myth of how she would have had those twentysomethinger offspring to visit her and take care of her during the elder years. My complex used to be full of older people until they passed on or went to "homes". Anytime the adult children came to visit, I always noticed resentments and animosity. It ain't the Nirvana that many people believe when it comes to having children.

Guest, regarding the relative who had to marry his pregnant girlfriend and the parents having to get them set up in a condo & car, USA parents often do the same here in the States. The security company I work for used to have a contract with a condo that used to be a high-end hotel. One of my friends still works there but as "in-house" security. She said that many of the residents are doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. However, a lot of the "owners" are young people in their 20's & very early 30's whose parents BOUGHT them their condos to get them out of the house!

Like I have already mentioned many times, many of today's young adults often refuse to move out of the family home expecting that they do not have to work for the same standard of living. And...they don't when Mommy and Daddy BUY them a condo to get them out of the home!

I hate that argument, that children are "part" of marriage. I married the love of my life in July, and we have a great partnership. Even if we liked or wanted kids (we don't), we'd be stupid to mess this up. It should be considered an insult when one partner asks the other to help add to overpopulation. It's like saying, "I'm bored with you...I want endless, mindless drudgery with which to fill my time."

Breeders, I just think I'm better than you because I know your world could not handle children I'd be forced to raise, thusly I chose not to have children I do not want.

Seriously though, what is up with these breeders...
First, we're selfish, evil, stuck up, hatefull assholes for not breeding. They assume we think they're better than them.
Second, we're sad, pathetic, lonely people who will end up eating dried cat food scraped from cans out of the garbage. Due to our childish impusiveness, we will freeze to death in our homes to be eaten by our pets.

I mean, get over yourselves already. Do you seriously think I'd give one thought towards you, evil or good, if you weren't always trying to shove THE LIFESCRIPT (tm), and/or your children, up my ass? Do you think, maybe, just possibly, if you just accepted that not everyone thinks, acts, or feels the same way you do, and left the weirdos who hurt no one alone that maybe, just maybe, we'd be a little more tolerant of you and your germ spewing hellspawn? Maybe, if you didn't try to take over EVERYFUCKINGTHING and make it SAFE FOR THE BAYBEEESSS so you can take your pathetic selves out in public to keep from killing each other at home, then maybe, just maybe, I wouldn't swivel my lazer eyes of death at your stupid family unit while you blindly allow your children to misbehave at the store, or finally whip your tit out in my favorite coffee shop after baby stalking me with your screaming loaf for 10 minutes? Ya think? You think maybe if you showed me, and my "alternative" lifestyle one iota of respect, that I would recriprocate? Trust me when I say I would.

But NOOOOOO...there is no respect from breeders. I doubt they even know the meaning of the word. It's all about them, and their precious spawn. If you don't immediately kneel before the "baby bump" and promise to do anything for it, you're an evil asshole. If you don't cotton to screaming children knocking you over in the store, you obviously hate them, and would kill them in a moment's notice. If you give the stink eye to a father who brings Snotleigh to your bar, and asks you to "tone down your language" you may as well have done the old "Seig Heil" in face, and thrown his child in a box car to be shipped off to a camp. If you wave your hands and say "no, no really, I don't want to", when they give you the "opportunity" to hold the golden loaf, you obviously strangle kittens in your spare time. Thusly, I will recriprocate with an equivilant lack of respct for you. I will yell "shut the fuck up" at your unattended screaming children. I will not hold your baby and say how good it smells. I will not babysit, even if you threaten to leave the child on my step. I certianly am not going to interviene when your precious spawn is running like a maniac into the street.

"It truly is the one commonality that every designation of humans you can think of has, there's at least one asshole."
--Me

Dragon, what a powerful admission on your part. I occasionally catch myself being envious of other people, particularly wealthy people who didn't have to do much work to get there. For example, a woman I work with, who is kind of a twit, just built a $750,000 house with her husband. But then I realize, I wouldn't want her life because she has a child (she talks about him nonstop) and she is only living there because of husband's income. She works part time and I know, having been with them, that she is not an equal partner in her marriage. Her husband is a picky PITA. So even rich people have their burdens. Mine are okay with me. No matter how hard my day is, I'm always proud of myself that I didn't sprog when I was pressured by my ex-husband. I don't think I am better than anyone else, but I have maintained my dignity in my life choices.

Feh, that post was beautiful. Now that I am in my mid-40's it just infuriates me, all the bullshit I had to put up with being female and all the pressure to sprog. The nerve of those people. And the OP...can you imagine someone pulling you aside and asking you if you thought you were going to "get away with" not having a llama? Why to people feel prefectly justified in hassling people over personal issues?

A lot of own ranting comes from having the whole parunting thing shoved down my throat 24/7. When some guy at work dropped dead at age 37, the Twit I mentioned in the first paragraph started up with her crap and I cut her off dead. I said, don't even say "at least he didn't have keeeds. I don't want to hear it." Am I a bitch? Yes, but maybe she'll think before she says something so thoughtless next time. Isn't it awful to say, well, at least he didn't have keedz, as if that makes SOMEONE'S DEATH better?

I'm sick of hearing that CF people don't deserve public assistance (when everyone else gets it) or that they are less than other people.

Whoever the delusional fuckwit that came up with the idea that staying together for the sake of brats needs to be buried alive in diaper shit.

Most couples that I know that stayed married and together for their brats ended up more fucked up than Jack Nicholson in "The Shining". They were either suicidally depressed, enraged to the point of paranoiac sociopathy or so deeply resentful that they split the day the brats were out of the house.

On a different side of the issue, I think we all had some pressure at some point to conform to the lemming behavior that is breederism. Whether that pressure was overt or of the insidious passive-aggressive kind, we still faced it to some degree. While I initially resented some of the pressure I had from relatives, it was my mom and dad who sat me down and explained that the relatives were not only stuck in some TV-land version of life, but had such desperately miserable lives that they could not comprehend someone not wanting to share in the general lake of pain that brats create.

When I was in my first year of nursing school, I got pregnant by an asshole who I thought I loved. I found out I was pregnant, he split and I could not get to the abortion clinic fast enough. I am very proud that I took control of my situation, and in the end it was that self-determination and willpower that gave me the strength to make my own life and to turn off the voices that I found disagreeable in my life. Goddess knows that any major life decision requires courage, but just surrendering to the the life script and shooting out brats to fulfill someone else's picture of what your future should be seemed a complete copout to me. I refuse to surrender to someone else's vision of what my life should be. I will make those decisions, and live with the consequences and the rewards that may come with them.

Every time you remove a choice, you remove a potential avenue for someone to change their life for the better. That is why I support NARAL and Planned Parenthood as strongly as I do. The minute you take that reproductive freedom away from women, that becomes that hour of our enslavement, and I will be damned if I let that happen in my time.

Thank-you, Bell_Flower.

I can totally admit to being previously jealous of a friend's wife who is a nasty thing who does not appreciate the good life she has and was able to get out of Thailand. I had to look at that part of me...especially since I used to swear up and down how I was not a jealous person! It was a hard thing for me to admit.

Like you, Bell_Flower, I realised that I did not want this woman's life. Work is a b*tch and I would just love to be able to devote my time to something worthwhile than the junk we endure just to get a half-@ssed paycheck! However, my friend's wife is a miserable woman who has everything re: the material world...yet she still is NOT happy and screams for her husband to buy more. The latest thing is threatening divorce since she has learned she can take him financially in the States. Another tactic is telling him that she does not care if he has another woman once he retires and they move to Thailand.

As much as I hate it when my three days off come to a close each week, I do believe I have also maintained my dignity in my life's choices. I do not need to marry a man because of being a divorced mother looking for someone to "help" with that child like the above-mentioned woman. I don't have to endure a man's rotten behaviour due to having sprogged. As much as I would like to do other things than go to work each day, I have my dignity because I earn my own way. I can take pride in knowing that what I own is mine because I worked for these things.

CFBfromLA, I am also very glad that abortion is an option because I got pregnant in 1994 from an assh*le I also thought I loved. I always knew I did not want children so abortion was The Plan as soon as the home pregnancy test showed a nasty "+". I am also a strong supporter of NARAL and Planned Parenthood. My soon-to-be former husband claims to be liberal but cries how NARAL is so radical. Please...he, like many men, are secretly angry that a woman will fight for what she wants. Even the liberal men act this way...

Dragon:

Thanks for the kind words. I told my mom that I was pregnant and getting an abortion, and she took a deep breath and told me that she was angry. She told me that her anger stemmed not from me getting an abortion, because she thought it was a smart idea. Instead, she was angry at herself. that she had not talked to me earlier about my options and offered whatever support I needed. Even though my father was very right wing in many ways, he was very pro-choice because he said that the government had no right over anyone's genitals. I was never so proud of them, while I was ashamed of myself for not being smarter about using contraception. Thankfully, my parents and friends helped me through that time and I am stronger for it.

Many years later, I found out that the would-be duhddie who sperm-infected me had been bludgeoned to death in a drug deal gone bad. Maybe I am a cold hearted witch, but I could not muster any sympathy for that lousy fucking excuse for wasted skin. The article in the paper said he had fathered four brats by four different babymamas and had abandoned all of them. I think the asshole got what he deserved. Karma, like me, is a queen bitch on wheels when she's riled.

CFBfromLA, I am glad you had supportive parents when you had the abortion. I am also very fortunate to have a mother who is very pro-choice and supports my childfree choices. Don't beat yourself up for being young and not using contraception. Many younger people believe nothing "bad" will happen to them which is why I support sex education as early as Grade 6. I had definitely been using birth control when I got pregnant. The failure rate was extremely low but I tend to be the one who hits the odds for the "bad stuff"...sigh.

I always hoped that "sex" education would actually begin in elementary school. If kids knew about their genitals (I've met adults who don't know that it's bad when you have stinky discharge) and what they're for, then people could actually talk honestly about sex when the time was appropriate. Instead you've got parents teaching their kids stupid names for their body parts, and by default embaressment and shame about those parts, so one can't even engage in any sort of honest discussion about what they do. It just pisses me off when a small child says something about their "wee wee", "noonie", "poopie" or whatever. How hard is it to just say "hey kid, that's your penis (or vagina), it's how pee comes out of us. When you're older, you might want to do other things with it, but we'll talk about that later".