Broken Pathetic Creatures
You don’t want to have kids? What’s wrong with you?
Nothing. You are fine. In many ways, you are probably enjoying this day a lot more than me. I had to wake up at 3am when #1 started shouting that his TV was broken. Huh? In my sleepy haze, I said, “Get back up to bed!” And then I made the hike up the ladder to his bunk bed to continue my sleep, because I knew it would be the quickest way to get him to stop talking and have all of us resume our slumber. I woke up at 5am to go back to my bed, and he said, “I love you, Nose Picker.” Thanks.
This morning on the news, I saw an interview with Kat Kinsman who wrote an editorial called I am nobody’s mother and never will be. She mentioned how she got a lot of scathing emails essentially calling her a broken, pathetic creature, and how not having kids is unnatural, and how her life has no meaning.
What a bunch of idiots.
The bottom line is there are a lot of people out there who have kids that should never have been parents. You know what’s the one thing I’ve learned from my professional work AND my experience as a mother? You shouldn’t have kids unless YOU really want them. You shouldn’t have them because that’s the expectation in life. You shouldn’t have them because society says this is what comes next. You should ONLY have them because you are ready to give up your happiness for someone else’s.
I love my kids more than I could imagine I was ever capable and I understand things differently now. DIFFERENTLY. Not better. Not more. Different. And that’s the deal with people who choose not to have kids. They’re not wrong. They’re making a different choice. And this mother thinks that’s just fine.
