Hi chicks!
I apologize if this ends up being a long post, but there are some questions I feel I need to ask and some things that I feel I need to get off my chest. I was hoping that I could maybe hear the perspective from some moms in the group.
So, when I was 16 years old or so, I decided that I didn’t want kids, and I have pretty much stuck to that story from then until now. I always gave various reasons as to why I didn’t want them- I wanted to travel, I wanted to have lots of hobbies, I wanted to concentrate on my career, I wanted to do charity work, etc. etc. And I suppose in a way that those are valid reasons.
But with the recent onslaught of babies being born around me (I am getting to be in that age group now- marriages and babies abound), I have taken a little time to really and truly analyze WHY I don’t want babies. And here is what I have discovered:
I want babies. I am just convinced that they will destroy my marriage, and if it came to how much I want babies vs. how much I love my husband, I choose my husband.
Okay, so once I came to this conclusion- that I am afraid of babies, that I believe they are marriage destroyers – I realized that I needed to start really rethinking this, because that fear seems a little too irrational to be valid.
After some analysis of my childhood, I was able to kind of put some pieces together and figure out why I feel the way that I do about children. Here is some pretty personal back story:
My parents didn’t/don’t have the greatest marriage. I grew up listening to them fight on a pretty consistent basis. And I am not talking about minor disagreements, I am talking about full-on “I hate you”-“I wish we were never married”-“I need a divorce” kind of fights. And these fights, almost always, were about… “The kids”. I guess from an early age, I had kind of developed this idea that it was me and my sister’s fault that their marriage was always on the rocks.
My parents never did anything together. They went on a date, I think, twice in the entire time I lived at home. Only once did we ever go on vacation as a family. All the other times, it was my mom taking us kids, and my dad stayed home. My mom would tell me on a regular basis that we kids were more important than their marriage. One day, when I was about 9 or 10, I was emptying out the dishwasher and I told my mom “I want to be a good wife some day” (which is sad, because apparently, I thought doing the dishes = good wife, but I digress) and my mom turned to me and said “No, you shouldn’t care about being a good wife. You should care about being a good mom. That is the most important. Being a good mom is the greatest compliment you will ever get.” And that statement scared the living $h** out of me. Because the way I saw it at that age, that was why my mom and dad didn’t have a good marriage. I was convinced in my mom’s head, my sister and I had replaced my father, and that’s why they fought. And it was then that I started getting the idea that children = marriage destroyers.
Fast forward to now. We are at a fair (this is last weekend), and two of the most recent babies in my circle of friends are there, with their parents. Instantly, the women all separate from the men, and the babies hang out with the women (actually, one of the new dads hung out with the women, which upset some of the men, lol). So here I am, in the middle, just observing. The women coo and make funny faces and cuddle the babies and laugh… it’s ALL ABOUT THE BABIES. And then men, seemingly ostracized from the group, just kind of awkwardly stared at the women who could now no longer speak proper English (they are now speaking only baby-tongue). My husband stood FAR FAR AWAY from the women’s group. Later, when the women and men finally came back together, my husband pulled me aside and told me how scary that whole situation was to him. And I agreed. The whole scene seemed to just reaffirm everything that I had grown up believing- once the babies come into the women’s lives, the husbands seem to be replaced.
I guess what I am looking for is some kind of sign or proof that a couple can have a baby, and they can still be each other’s #1. I feel like today’s society is very baby-centric. All the tabloids are looking for “baby bumps” and there are all these shows on about families with 8 million kids, and shows like “baby story” and “bringing home baby”. Is there any room for a happy marriage in there?
So, here is what I am asking moms on here:
• If I were to wind up pregnant, how would I avoid having the baby destroy our marriage? Honestly, my husband is the most important thing in the world to me (well, besides myself, which I have learned is really important too). I would never want anything to come between us.
• Is it possible to love your husband as much as your children? I have heard from other women say that it’s not “okay” to love your spouse as much/ more than your kids. Why?
• How would I make sure that my husband didn’t feel replaced by the baby? How would I make him feel more involved if we were to have one?
I am sorry this was such a long post, but these thoughts have just really been bothering me. Somewhat because of all the babies being born, but also because my husband and I had a condom malfunction the day before I ovulated… and now, of course, I am faced with these questions “just in case”. Part of me is scared to death of the idea of a baby... but there's that other tiny part of me that seems okay with it.