This is genuinely confusing to me because I've seen so many parents who integrate their children's needs into their own and everyone gets what they need. Rather than losing something by having kids, they seem only to see parenting as gaining something in their lives.
Needs that cannot be met for me on a regular basis as a parent: personal "recharge" time and space; writing/creative time; enough sleep (YBMV).
Anything that I, personally, need to be emotionally healthy and balanced that requires alone/self-centered (in the good way) time, I do not at the current time in my parenting life get. It's a trade off, and the pros certainly outweigh the cons, but I'd be a poopy lie head if I didn't fess up to the part where there are, in fact, cons.
sits close, but not too close to Plei. I will say that there has been progress for me on this front in the last couple of months.
Makes sense. The time aspect of it is something I've always wondered about. How does it get managed without a tag team effort?
And go you with the truth telling. Much better than harboring resentments that end up popping out in weird ways.
t /my parents
Timelies all!
Ack, now I'm remembering the cross-country trip my family took the summer I was 16. My brother was not quite 14, and quite the pest. There's a reason I refer to that trip as the cross-country trip from hell...
So, who's watching Obama and who's watching Pushing Daisies?
What Plei mentioned is part of the reason I have never wanted children. I know that I need alone/down time, and I'm not willing to give that up. Especially since I never had a strong urge to have my own kidlings. Borrow other people's, sure! My own? No way.
Our car trips were hell in our teens only because 1 of us inevitably ending up sharing a room with our parents at some point and my Dad snored like you wouldn't believe.
I'll be watching Obama, at least for a bit.
I haven't seen YBMV in so long! I am nostalgiac.
I am tommyrot in regard to kids-- I am so happy other people want to have them. I can barely handle the cat. I also never ever as a child fantasized about having kids or eing married. But I did fantasize about being an executive secretary. Or marrying a divorced man with grown children. Heck-- I didn't even understand that I was a kid until I went to Kindergarten and met other kids-- and they drove me nuts!
In the past 5 or 10 years, I have discovered that I actually do like kids-- that the filters they lack make them so so interesting. But I know if I had kids, I would lose it, and since my mother lost it on me on a regular basis I did not have any desire to repeat that.
This is genuinely confusing to me because I've seen so many parents who integrate their children's needs into their own and everyone gets what they need. Rather than losing something by having kids, they seem only to see parenting as gaining something in their lives.
Good for them. Speaking just for myself, becoming a parent did not magically transform me into a completely new and better person with no need for personal time or space.
As Plei says, the pros outweigh the cons by a pretty wide margin, but I can count the number of times I've been alone in my own home in the past year on one hand. The number of times I've been able to say a spontaneous yes to after-work drinks with friends. The number of movies I've seen in a theatre.
Those of us who remember being self-sufficient on trips probably were, but we're not gonna remember how we were at 20 months or 4 years old when we needed the most attention. There's a big difference between under-fives and older kids.
A *huge* yes to this. I remember being self-sufficient on 18-hour car trips too, but since all my memories include at least 2 other kids in the car, I'm clearly not remembering the years when I was a toddler with the attention span of a goldfish with ADD and a bladder the size of a leaky peanut.
