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This is not a question I would feel comfortable posing to anyone I know personally (like money, the subject is too "sacred" for family, lol) but I've been wondering for ages if anyone could explain their thought process if there was one, for their decision to have kids.
If it was just "automatic" or "expected" that is a decent reason, but if you really gave it thought, what was your reasoning?
Those of us without the maternal gene, would like to know! Thanks....
I always wanted kids. Wanted to be a SAHM. Only got to have one even though I dreamed of having more. I had to work all my life and never got to sit home and just be a mom, but her friends were always over, and I was a Girl Scout leader, so I got to be around more kids on a regular basis. I also did class-mom things, even though I was a working mom. I used vacation days for school events and to chaperone field trips.
I had two younger brothers and learned to diaper and feed them and take care of them when the first was born when I was 8. The next one came along two and a half years later. By the time I was 12 and 13, I had control of the neighborhood babysitting industry. I mean, people actually left me with their infants at that age. I don't think they knew how young I was.
So while I didn't sit down and think at any point, "Hmmm, do I want to be a mother?" the reasons were that I liked kids. I enjoyed being around them. Most of them, anyway.
My daughter is the opposite. Someone gave her two beautiful baby dolls as a gift, a boy and a girl She set them up in the corner of her room and never played with them. She couldn't stand my great-nephew getting all the attention when he was born when she was 5 and had no interest in even looking at him at all. As a teen, she would complain if there were any kids in the vicinity making normal kid noises, and when she was working as a lifeguard at a co-op building pool when she was 18, she was annoyed when the 10-year-old boys she kept telling to stop running and splashing wouldn't listen to her or follow the rules, as if she expected 10-year-old boys to operate otherwise. She taught English to small children in China for a year, and she said that cemented her realization that she does not want to teach little kids. She has taught high school and college classes and loves that, though.
Her best friend recently had a baby, and there's this great picture of the two of them, the friend holding her baby girl, and my daughter holding her French bulldog.
My daughter did think about it. She had tubal ligation at 26, and it was a good decision. While I wanted kids as a young woman, at this age I most certainly do not want to raise another.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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As one of 9 children I actually thought as a single person that I did not want to have any, since my parents had used up more than their share. I was also soured by the way my father treated us, today he would have been arrested many times, though back in the 1960s his behavior was not legally considered abuse. After deciding that I would marry my wife (of 48 years now) but before we were engaged I brought up the subject of having kids to see how she felt about it, and my agreement to two kids resulted from a discussion in which she suggested that I had an opportunity to do a better job as a father and raise happy kids. We ended up having three, though, two just didn't seem enough. What I learned form having ours is that until you have them there is no way to express to others the joy, hope, love and fun. If you haven't had kids, you don't miss it because you don't know what you are missing, so people can be perfectly happy without having kids. Better yet for us has been having grandkids, truly amazing to see our kids having kids, great fun to have the grandkids over for a weekend, enjoy them and then turn them back over to their parents.
I didn't think I wanted them until I did. The biological alarm clock is real! My only regret now is that I didn't have more.
I have a friend like that. She was an only child and did not like children at all. Her best friend had a baby, and one day she arrived at a barbecue where another friend was holding her best friend's baby. She exclaimed, "Oh, I didn't know you had a baby!" to which her best friend scolded her for not recognizing her little girl. The childless friend was confused because to her, all babies looked the same.
This same friend was taken to a christening on a date. The parents had put their cherub to sleep in one of those box seats on the floor next to a table, and my friend tripped on the way back from the bar carrying a plastic cup full of beer and spilled it all over the newly-christened child. She and her date left the party in a hurry.
Another time she was holding someone's baby when the baby farted, and she jumped up holding the baby in her hands with her arms straight out and yelling "Somebody please take it! Please take it!"
Then she got married, and she and her husband decided to have kids. When her daughter was a couple of months old, she told me that her husband had said the night before, "You know, I love our daughter, but you will always be first in my heart." She said she couldn't return the sentiment because "If need be, I would kill him to save her." She had another daughter a few years later. She quit her job to stay home with them. She is as close with her now-adult daughters as any mother could be.
As one of 9 children I actually thought as a single person that I did not want to have any, since my parents had used up more than their share. I was also soured by the way my father treated us, today he would have been arrested many times, though back in the 1960s his behavior was not legally considered abuse. After deciding that I would marry my wife (of 48 years now) but before we were engaged I brought up the subject of having kids to see how she felt about it, and my agreement to two kids resulted from a discussion in which she suggested that I had an opportunity to do a better job as a father and raise happy kids. We ended up having three, though, two just didn't seem enough. What I learned form having ours is that until you have them there is no way to express to others the joy, hope, love and fun. If you haven't had kids, you don't miss it because you don't know what you are missing, so people can be perfectly happy without having kids. Better yet for us has been having grandkids, truly amazing to see our kids having kids, great fun to have the grandkids over for a weekend, enjoy them and then turn them back over to their parents.
I told my daughter that since she has chosen not to have children, she will never know the love a parent has for a child, which is unique from any other form of love. I told her I was telling her that not to make her feel in any way as if she was missing anything, but that she needs to know that this level of love exists so that she does not question why people she knows who are parents behave the way they do when it seems illogical to her.
I admit that my recollections of 3 or 4 decades ago may be faulty. And really the period when I was forming ideas about wanting children or not goes back even further. Having said that, I suspect I felt I would be a father without much considering the alternative. That it was part of my life script. I liked babies when I was a kid so I had no aversion to the idea, but I can't say fatherhood was something I had a strong desire to experience. Until I did.
I think I was very much the "this is what you do" sort of thing for me. Nobody says they regret having kids (even if they do). My husband was 100% for it, so we went for it.
I panicked for 9 months, thinking I had made a HUGE mistake, and then it was love at first sight. Everyone told me it would be, but I didn't believe them. After that, I was 100% on the baby train!
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