No maternal instinct (was: Sexism, division of labor

[vulgarweed]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "catlady_de_los_angeles" <catlady at w...> 
wrote:
> --- In HPFGU-OTChatter at y..., "A. Vulgarweed" <fluxed at e...> wrote:
> 
> > See, I was born without the "maternal instinct" gene. Never felt
> > it as a child (never had or wanted any baby or child dolls), have 
> > never felt it since, and at 33, I think if it was ever going to
> > kick in, it would have started by now. 
> 
> Me too! (And I'm 44 and in menopause, altho' my friends tell me 
it's 
> too early, so it had better not kick in now.) My brother was born 
> three days before my 2nd birthday. My mother told me (I don't 
> remember this myself) that she gave me a fancy wets-itself-and-
cries 
> baby doll so I wouldn't be jealous of my new sibling, but I refused 
> to play with it and kept throwing it aside. I played only with my 
> teddy bear (whom I don't remember) and my teddy tigers (whom I 
> remember as having lost their eyes from too much play and being 
> generally ragged but greatly beloved).


Yeah. For me it was animals too. Stuffed animals, tons of them. 
Dinosaurs. I was also a huge Star Wars geek (it came out when the 
summer I turned 8) so I was obsessed with all that stuff too. 
Sometimes I'd make up these weird little worlds involving all of them 
together.

I don't know if I ever had a _negative_ image of motherhood so much 
as it just never struck me as something I wanted to do - even as a 
child I didn't think I'd ever do it. I wanted to be a paleontologist! 
I wanted to go out in the desert and discover dinosaur bones all day. 
A few years later I wanted to be a heavy metal guitarist. Ya 
know? "Mommy" just wasn't on the horizon. And it never did get there. 
But I didn't have a bad childhood, and no one in my immediate family 
really put down or devalued anyone else. It's just that different 
people develop different interests, for who knows what reason. I 
fundamentally don't understand why a decision not to be a mother, for 
someone who's not very interested in kids, is any more controversial 
or emotionally-loaded than someone who's not good at math deciding 
they probably don't have a bright future in nuclear physics. But I 
know that culturally, it is. (Division of labor, I think it is! :))

AV