"I’m for abortion. If you can’t love your kid, don’t have it because it will grow up and kill us."
-
John Waters (via ikenbot)
AMEN.
People always patronize me when I say I don’t want to have kids. Especially mothers. They say, “Oh, I said the same thing when I was your age.”
I have to say it again and they tell me I’ll change my mind. What do they know about me or what I want my body to do? It’s incredibly thoughtless and condescending.
Here’s why I NEVER want kids:
- I have a lot of mental health problems. Is it impossible for a woman with bi-polar disorder to raise a child? No. Is it harder for the mother and child? I believe so. My mother is bi-polar, unmedicated, and in complete denial about it. And you know what? She was a pretty shit mother who tore our family apart. I don’t want to be that person.
- I have an eating disorder. I see women who get pregnant and never lose the baby weight and that’s my biggest nightmare. It’s a struggle every day to not give in to my disorder and I’ve been pretty good about it. But I do slip up and putting on 30 pounds just to have a baby gives me a panic attack. I need to be stable to lead a normal life. A pregnancy would make me spiral out of control because “you can eat whatever you want.” Well, I can’t really get away with eating whatever I want because it triggers me. I have a routine and I’m careful, but the food cravings that come with pregnancy would both overcome me and wrack me with guilt. Is this 100% fact? I don’t know. Do I find it incredibly plausible? Yes.
- Here’s the biggest one: I HATE CHILDREN. I nannied for almost a year and I had several mental breakdowns. I was completely miserable. Again, I get the whole “it’s different when it’s your child” thing and you know what? Big fuckin’ deal. Sure, I’ll love them, but I’ll also completely resent them for making me exhausted all the time, pestering me, for screaming and not going to bed, for making it impossible to do something as easy as going to dinner or a movie. Fuck kids. The cons outweigh the pros so much, I can’t believe women still think I’ll change my mind even after I give them this long and extensive list of things that show I’m not qualified for the job.
And why is there a stigma attached to women who never have kids? Oh, she’ll never have a full life because she doesn’t know the joy of motherhood. Well, she can’t understand, she doesn’t have kids. She’s selfish. She’d rather think about herself than the miracle of having a family. Her family isn’t complete because she doesn’t have one.
Well newsflash:
- I do have a family. They’re called my parents, sisters, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends…and who’s to say that the love of my life isn’t enough family for me? Your whole family can be just one amazing person.
- I’m not being selfish. I’m being selfless. Do you really want an emotionally unstable woman raising a child embedded with the same genetic failures as their crazy mother? Bi-polar disorder is often genetic. My mother’s anxieties fed into and fashioned my own anxieties. My father’s obsession with food, weight, and exercise taught me to eat numbers and not food. I don’t want to create another me. I’m an awesome, awesome person. I think I’m the bees knees (and it took me a long time to reach that conclusion). But I’m also a very sad person, and not in the way that I need to be pitied. I’ve spent a majority of my life hating myself and wondering what the fucking point was that I was even on this planet. I was tricked by my manic stages into thinking that if I wasn’t so crazy, I could feel that good all the time, not realizing that I wasn’t experiencing “happy” but experiencing the delusions that come with mania. I’m being a decent, smart human being by saying, “No. I don’t want to have a child and see them in the kind of pain I’ve been in.” During my last depressed cycle, I talked to my dad and cried saying, “this is my life. I’m going to have this for the rest of my life and it’s not going to go away.” This was right around the time my little sister was released from a the psychiatric ward. I said to him, “I’m sorry you have such deeply unhappy children.” I know that our pain is his pain. No one wants to see their child suffer, so I can avoid that pain by not bringing deeply unhappy children on to a planet that is already overpopulated. I’m doing you a favor.
- Does having a child define me as a woman? No. The idea that you’re not a complete woman because you didn’t have a baby is so hypocritical and misogynistic, it makes me see red especially because it’s almost always women who are saying that. It’s fine if you want to be defined by your ability to pop out babies, but that’s not what being a woman is. No one defines men by their ability to have children and it’s only because they don’t actually bear the child. I am complete as I am. I am a woman because of that. I don’t need a child to prove that I’m a woman.
(via pinthetailonthehonky)
(via ladypandacat)
