Reproduction

I have oscillated on my position on having children more times than I'm willing to admit.

When I was a churchgoer, I wanted babies, probably because having offspring seemed to be your ticket to being accepted by the womenfolk and the line in the sand drawn regarding how you'd be treated if you were in your 20s... as an adult or a glorified teenager.

Post-church, my desire to reproduce ceased and I headed back the other direction. I didn't want to have kids. It wasn't such a big deal at first... I was still in school, I was planning my wedding... Most of my school friends didn't even have girlfriends, much less were they thinking of having kids. My wedding planning buddies online were busy planning weddings, not thinking about when they were going to have their first kid.

Sometime after the wedding, and after the weddings of most of the people I spent time getting to know online while I was planning, an epidemic of baby fever hit just about every person female and under 40 that I knew online, which resulted in a bunch of people I knew getting pregnant.

The sort of women who tend to frequent the sort of non-tech boards I frequent often times tend to be of the "planning" variety... and depending on where you are in your planning, you're labeled a variety of different ways. If you want kids and are thinking about having them but aren't ready to start trying you're TOC (Thinking of Conceiving) or WTTC (Waiting to Try To Conceive). If you're ready to start trying, you're TTC (Trying to Conceive). If you aren't sure if you're TOC/WTTC or TTC you're OTL (On the Line)... and then you're pregnant or are a mother.... but if you don't want kids? You're CF, which is childfree.

At first, I dug in my heels about the reproducing thing. I didn't have any desire to have kids. Certainly not now, maybe not ever. I wore my childfree title proudly. My friends, however, were drinking the water. One by one, turning up pregnant. I wish I could say I played it cool and was completely unaffected... but that's not how it was.

The thing about women, at least my experience with women, is that they tend to gravitate towards those in situations similar to their own. Engaged women planning weddings will gravitate towards other engaged women planning weddings. Pregnant women to pregnant women. Mothers to mothers. That being the case, when your circle of friends starts doing something life changing like having babies, it's hard not to feel some peer pressure towards doing the same thing lest you start losing friends due to changing priorities and growing apart.

Every pregnancy reported sounded like a doomed friendship to me. My inner selfish heathen grieved.

Then our niece Addison arrived. This sent me staggering back in the other direction. She's just too darn cute, and her birth gave me case of baby fever... Timing wasn't right, we were living in a crummy apartment to have in, and we weren't sure we were ready anyway... but I certainly wanted one, much to my embarrassment.

Yes, embarrassment. You see, being childfree on a message board full of mothers is one thing... They fully expect you to come around one of these days and change your mind. When you're childfree, this is mildly annoying because you'd like to be taken seriously about your position on reproduction yet the ones that have spawned offspring or want to, won't. However, in that moment when you waiver on your position, the mothers are kind and understanding and make you feel like you fit right in, and the childfree make you feel like a traitor.

When I was diagnosed with ADHD in January and put on medication, I swung back towards the not wanting to reproduce again. How much of that's the fear of not wanting to come off of medication (it's worked wonders) and how much of that's fear of not wanting to spawn an ADHD child (both Matt and I are, it's likely), I'm not sure... but the idea seems far fetched again and once again I feel an outcast... Except this time, I don't feel like I'm childfree either.

*nod*

Yeah, I kind of went about things similarly-- I wanted kids when I was little more or less because Everyone Has Kids, and the older I get the less I want them. Particularly since lesbianism became my preferred form of contraception. ^_^ I'd really, really have to want to have kids to start the onerous process of adoption or artificial insemination or whatever route it ended up being, and I just can't essay up that much want.

Seeing other people with babies does pique my curiosity WRT the process of pregnancy-- what WOULD it be like to have a little alien swimming around in one's midsection? It's the next eighteen-plus years that continue to dampen my enthusiasm for parenthood. I'm not THAT curious.

I still don't claim the "childfree" label very enthusiastically; it's not totally inaccurate, since when I lay out my five- or ten-year life plans children never appear in them, but I'm not rabidly opposed to the concept of being a mother either should the right other-mother happen along at an opportune time. *shrug* She'd have to be pretty damn inspiring, though.

As a Childfree person (and

As a Childfree person (and even fixed). I would like to say that I have no problem with you changing your mind. Everybody has the right to do so.

Lots of childfree people are like this. Conditions change, people change.

Whatever decision you make, it's your decision to make.

Smiling

god damn breeders Eye-wink

This is such a frustrating

This is such a frustrating time, isn't it? I have a LOT of friends doing the pregnancy/mom thing lately, and I'll admit, I've been bit by the bug too (though I happen to think it's a direct result of shopping for so many tiny, cute clothes and toys) Sticking out tongue

Of course, I do everything very carefully and cautiously, frequently dividing common steps into even smaller little baby steps. Like when we were buying the house, we went from renting to thinking about looking at houses to looking at houses to thinking about buying to buying. There's a couple extra steps in there and we ended up looking at something like fifty houses. When we decide to have kids, I don't imagine it will be a "Hey, let's have kids!" and we jump right in. It'll probably be a much slower process of stopping actively *not* trying to have kids long before we actively start trying.

Point is, everyone does everything differently. It can be appealing to jump on one bandwagon or the other, but often times, it's just never quite the right fit. Up until a few months ago, I was very firmly against having kids for quite a few years. Now, however, I'm at a much more secure point in my life and the whole idea isn't so terrifying. You'll always know deep down what the right decision is for you and Matt.

Cliques and clubs everywhere

It is a club, the motherhood thing. As is the no-kids-on-purpose thing, and the no-kids-because-we-can't thing, and so on and so forth. So many categories, and each one can only be joined with certain specific activities.

I don't know the right answer. I do believe that no one should feel pressured to have kids; that kids should be something you have only if you can't imagine not doing so. I believe that there is no such thing as being ready or finding the right time - you'll never be fully ready and there will always be better, and worse, times.

But as to the important question, the "should I or shouldn't I" stuff, I don't know. I know it was right for me to have kids, and I always knew so. So that part was easy for me. I'm grateful. Easy is good. It's a lot easier than hard. (Whoa, deep.)

Baby Fever!

Woo! Baby fever! I think the babies themselves are like supercarriers for this particular affliction. Just one well-turn goo-goo can render even the most committed CF person powerless to infant-lust.

I would say don't be stigmatized by your new-fangled diagnosis. For one, we only started recognizing ADHD as a disease quite recently, but genetically speaking this isn't a new thing. It's been a natural part of life forever. Also, given you and your husband's experience you'd be ideal parents for the situation.

Finally, unrelatedly, the note about women gravitating to others with similar experiences is, I think, a general human thing as well. It's probably quite pronounced in the realms of marriage and childbearing, but I think most people are like this.

Actually, I was starting to

Actually, I was starting to cave shortly before she was born... I'm slightly embarrassed to admit that I spent the entire baby shower watching my sister-in-law open presents and thinking "Gee... If I don't have a baby, I don't get to open presents full of adorable baby things."

I don't know if I'd say I feel particularly stigmatized by the whole ADHD thing... I don't doubt that I probably could be a good parent, there's just a lot of stuff that goes along with it that I'm not sure I have much desire to be faced with... There's probably more that can be said about that... but it probably would best wait until I'm sober.

True, I do think it's an in general human trait to gravitate to others like ourselves... I've just always seemed to notice a behavioral difference between the genders when it comes to this... Maybe I'm wrong, but in my observations of people, I've often noticed that men often seem to place a higher priority on finding people with like interests rather than necessarily whether their friend is married or single or has kids or not, whereas with women the current situational details seem far more important.

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