User:Woozle/Childrearing
For a milder and less cynical version of this essay which also goes into some more historical detail, see why we have kids.
There's something everyone should understand about me (and Harena, too). Despite having, between the two of us, no less than five (5) offspring, neither of us wanted kids.
I mean, if you could think of a situation better designed to highlight our shortcomings as human beings, I'd like to hear it. We are now more-painfully-than-ever aware of our problems with:
- interpersonal communication (e.g. phone phobia)
- being organized
- financial management
- tolerance and patience
- ability to take care of others
- being in charge
- setting boundaries
- remembering appointments
- keeping up with reality
- dealing with poverty
- etc.
I know what you're thinking now: "But why did you have kids if you didn't want them?" The answer is simple: we were each individually talked into it by former spouses1. In Harena's case, said spouse promised to do the childrearing if Harena would just take care of the actual childbearing. Unfortunately, his ideas of childrearing were... incompatible with hers. (That's a whole other issue I won't get into now; suffice to say that the depth of this incompatibility was the straw which overrode her fear of the interpersonal contact necessarily involved in the process of getting a lawyer.)
You're probably also thinking "...but now they're here and you love them, right? Don't they light up your life in little ways?" Well, maybe. Emphasis on "little". We love our various mutual kids and we hope they grow up to be much happier and better-adjusted adults than we are, and that's about the most positive thing I can say about it.
I can't emphasize enough that having kids was so completely not a part of what we saw ourselves doing as adults. My ideas were always the only children I needed or wanted. I also have/had issues with the acts necessary to reproduce2. Taking those two together, this is not a situation I ever expected (much less planned) to find myself in. As a result, I'm more or less totally unprepared (practically and emotionally) to deal with it properly.
I mean, what do you do when you need to go somewhere, and you don't even have the first idea where to ask about babysitters? Plus severe phone-phobia means that "just calling around" (a solution frequently suggested to us) isn't an option. In other areas of our lives, we deal with this sort of thing by using the internet, or the automated check-out lane, or buying the parts and fixing the plumbing ourselves. We avoid the social contact and the uncertainty of depending on the whims of others wherever possible. But how do you build a babysitter? Where's the K-Mart for childcare?
For the people who would ban abortion while cutting social services for childcare: I'd rather have been aborted myself than end up this way, unable to afford to treat my own psychological issues (which most of you would prefer to sweep under the rug or label as evil) and unable to get assistance for raising the children we've been "graced" with due to not having learned how to say "no" when it mattered. Don't tell me about the wonderful genius potential of someone who would get aborted under liberal abortion laws; they're not going to get to use any of that genius potential if they spend most of their lives cleaning up poop and being afraid to make phone calls. Fuck you and the Bible you rode in on. (...But please be aware that when I say this, I only refer to those who claim the Bible as their source of moral authority or literal truth – not those who merely look to it for ideas and suggestions.)
Footnotes
- I can't complain so much; Harena ended up with four, one of them autistic and all with various schooling issues at one time or another.
- Again, another story; keywords: gender dysphoria, aversion to intercourse