moved from Main List: on not having children

[ssk7882]

Hey, all.  

Thanks so much for all the warm welcomes back!  I've just been 
catching up on that tiny, miniscule, insignificant handful of posts 
which have appeared on the list since I took my leave back in, er, 
April, and I just wanted to announce that I have now finally reached 
the June 21 release of OoP!  

Yay, me.

Only 20,000 posts left to go.

<buries head in hand and moans>

June 21 did seem like a pretty good time to stop and take a breather, 
though, so I thought I'd just hop in on this thread for a minute.

The Catlady wrote:

> And *I* am most certainly not going to tell you that not wanting to 
> ever have kids is 'just a phase' you're going through. That's what 
> people told me when I was your age ... and for years thereafter ... 
> and now I am 45 (46 in November) and I never had children, never 
> wanted to have children, never particularly liked children, still 
> hate babies, and do not regret lack of children.

Oh, ditto!  Ditto, ditto, ditto!  (Except that I'm only 37, but all 
the same is a big fat 'me too' from me.)

I think that raising children is a terrifically important and 
difficult job, and I admire people who can do it well.  But I've 
never felt any desire to be one of them. I don't relate very well to 
people under the age of 12 or 13 or so. I never have -- not even when 
I was *myself* under the age of 12 or 13 or so.  

And that supposed "biological clock?"  Haven't heard the faintest 
tick out of that sucker yet.  Why, if it weren't such an absolutely 
*subversive* suggestion, I might even think that thing to be nothing 
but a big, ugly, sexist *myth!*

But then, you know, I don't believe that there has ever been a single 
one of those "you'll feel differently about that when you're older" 
sentiments that ended up proving true for me?  And at this point, 
it's getting a bit late in the game for them to come true, methinks. 
So either I'm just remarkably immature, or the tendency of older 
people to use their seniority to dismiss younger people's opinions 
really *is* every bit as much of a bogus old *cheat* as I always 
suspected it to be.  

> (*I* feel noble rather than guilty for not inflicting MY genes for 
> obesity, ugliness, social ineptness, depression, and generally 
> being a loser on the gene pool.)

Aw, come on.  What about your own intelligence? Not to mention your 
kindness, your attentiveness to others, your enthusiasm, and your 
boundless stores of intellectual curiousity?

I mean, given a choice between a species of people who exhibit those 
traits and a species composed entirely of thin, pretty, *perky* 
people, I sure know which I'd choose.

Fortunately, I think that the luck of the genetic draw, as well as 
the role of nurture and choice, will likely ensure that there 
continue to be both types of people in the world -- as well as many 
others -- regardless of any of our individual decisions to breed or 
not to breed. 

> Drifting even further from my topic, I believe in *both* 
> genetics *and* environment, causing me to have opinions 
> which will offend EVERYONE. On such opinion: Women who 
> hand their children over to be raised by a nanny are 
> putting their child in the environment of the 
> intelligence, education, mode of speech, table manners, 
> religious beliefs, political beliefs, of a person who 
> chose that line of work either because she obsessively 
> adores being with children, or because she CAN'T get anything 
> that pays better. 

Boy! You really weren't joking when you said that you had opinions 
which would offend everyone!  I forgot to include "outspokenness," 
when I enumerated your virtues above. Is that nature or nurture, do 
you think?  

It seems to me that even leaving aside the rather, er...provocative? 
suggestion that smart women don't enjoy childcare (because I imagine 
you'll hear quite enough about *that* one!), I would like to point 
out that women with the economic freedom to pay others to handle the 
ickier aspects of child-rearing for them have been doing so 
throughout human history, and I don't see too much evidence that the 
children of privilege lean towards adopting the cultural mores of 
their caretakers, rather than those of their parents.

Rather, it seems to me that such children usually internalize the 
underlying class structure which leads to that division of labor 
*very* early on, and that they therefore tend to view their 
caretakers less as role models of an equally-viable alternative 
possibility for future adult life than they do as representatives of 
a particular class of Designated Other -- sometimes as 
representatives of a romanticized Designated Other (ie, the Mammy 
Syndrome), sometimes as representatives of a despised Designated 
Other ("Ew! You don't like *that* kind of music, do you? God, that's 
just the sort of stuff that my Nanny used to listen to!"), but very 
rarely as role models per se.  

More's the pity.


Elkins

(who believes that it is best for children to be exposed to as wide 
and diverse a variety of models of healthy adult behavior as possible 
while they are growing up, but who also thinks that the caregiver 
dynamic is, sadly, far too tainted with the poison of class to serve 
that function as it otherwise might do)