I don't know why these people can't see the problem when it's right in front of their eyes. Having children is not a requirement, and if you're scared to do it, then don't fucking do it! It's not like life-saving surgery where you're scared, but you need to do it or you'll die, so you try to get over it and hope things work out okay.
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The point is, you might be surprised at how relaxing and fun it is to have a baby. Personally, I loved it. I had an excuse to just exist for the first time in my life. I was not depressed at all. I was happy.
Yeah okay, there's nothing relaxing about having a loaf, even a wanted one. And secondly, it's pretty sad when a baby is your reason for having an "excuse" to exist. So, you don't have an excuse to exist unless you reproduce? I think that's another way of saying, "You're not a real woman until you've had kids."
Then there's one big question that nobody seems to have an answer to: what happens if you have kids and wind up not loving them after all? We're all familiar with the "you'll love it once it gets here" or "it's different when it's your own" bullshit, but what happens when you
don't love it and it's
not different? You're pretty much not "allowed" to give your kid away after it's more than 15 seconds old, and if you abandon the kid, you'll be considered a deadbeat and you'll owe child support. Obviously filicide is frowned upon as well as a disposal method, and while safe havens do exist, it seems like some of them proceed to go on a witch hunt for the mother while saying, "Ohhhh we just want to make sure she has proper medical care!" when they really want to charge her with abandonment. I'm sure none of the pro-baby cheerleaders are going to step up to raise the unwanted kids either, so the only option is to raise kids you don't want for two decades.
And dear lord, I'm fucking glad I don't have to sit around obsessing over fertility because it sounds exhausting charting mucous and recording temperatures and only fucking during certain windows when you're most likely to conceive. I'm worn out just trying to find a wrinkle cream that works. I can only imagine the kind of strain that alone will put on a relationship along with fertility treatments and obsessing over doing everything "right" to avoid miscarrying because pregnant women all think they're fragile little china dolls and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars they probably don't have on IVF, then blaming their partner if they do lose the clump. So if a pregnancy is carried to term or almost to term and results in a viable child, nerves are already pretty frayed from all the other shit I just described, meaning if the tiniest little thing goes wrong, it's going to cause serious waves between the two halves of the couple.
But of course, NOBODY ever suggests just not having kids. These advice columnists all seem to think having kids is just as much a part of adulthood as getting older and it's unavoidable. Or maybe they don't want to risk losing readership or bombardment with angry letters from breeder readers for daring to suggest that having kids is a choice because that might also imply that having them might be a bad choice.
The bottom line is it's not different when it's your own. You might think it is at first because you're still high on oxytocin after sluicing and you melt when you see the live creature you just made, but once that wears off, you'll realize the only way it's different when it's your own is that you're stuck with it 24/7.