Okay, tell the truth now. Haven't you even for a minute regretted having them? Sometimes I feel so trapped, so defined as so and so's mother, so and so's wife, so and so's caretaker. I, meaning my identity, could just slip down the drain and noone would be the wiser.
On the day my first child turned 18, I bawled my eyes out. Not because he was leaving the nest. Not at all. Because I looked at my (sweet, much loved) younger child, who was eight at that time and realized that I would be done now, but I had at least ten more years of feeding my soul with a demitasse spoon to someone who takes it totally for granted.
Babies are swell, from a distance, but even walking into a room with a sleeping one is uncomfortable because you know that at any moment it WILL go off. Time bomb. Tick tock. The demanding little tyrant will open it's mouth like a fire alarm and sound until it is rocked and fed and amused. You can commit manslaughter and get off in less than 18 years.
I don't think I had any idea what I was getting into. I feel it is my duty to suggest to young people that they can have a possibly even more satisfactory life without them. If you love a man, and bring a child into it, it does not bring you closer, why spoil it. When you feel all frisky junior is tapping at the door. Goodbye quiet evenings alone together, cooking breakfast in the nude. A 21 year old I know said that by the time she's 30, she'll have done everything she wants to do, and be ready to have kids. By the time I'm 200 I couldn't do everything I'd like to do. Join the Peace Corps, study ornithology, arcaeology, paleantology, geology, learn thai, hindu, italian, swahili, see all seven continents, walk the pacific crest trail from mexico to canada, walk all the way around Bali...
My son and I relate much better now that we can interact adult-adult, most of the time. The baby bird routine gets old. I am so ready to be his friend. I like him. You gals know I love my kids, and I know I don't have defend tha t love to you. It's not that I regret having "those kids." I think they would have been born even if I hadn't born them. But sometimes it's quite a load, and I feel lost under it.
I'm not even going to re-read what i've just cyber scrawled. |
