The Thinking Housewife: “When women were denied the vote, they could reside on a higher plane, far from the oily ministrations of politicians.”

Sometimes it seems that the people least prepared to have children are the most likely to have them. When you aren’t very good at keeping track of anything (finances, your boyfriend, the Pill) it’s easy to wind up accidentally pregnant. And then you have one very clueless person who now has another tiny clueless person depending on them.

Bagelsan, it might have helped if you’d specified that this was just an anecdote about specific people in your life and not a sweeping generalization about women, which is what it kind of looks like.

As a mother of one child and currently pregnant with Baby 2, the whole “afford to have children” thing annoys the shit out of me because it’s so damn subjective and life is damn unpredictable.

I mean, what, should you only be allowed to have kids if you save the some odd millions of dollars that kids are supposed to cost apiece?

When I found out I was pregnant the first time, I had just been diagnosed as infertile due to PCOS. I was lucky that I had a job with good health coverage so I could afford prenatal care, the cost of giving birth at a birthing center (covered 100% by my HMO), and able to afford the unpaid FMLA time off afterwards to heal and establish breastfeeding because my husband had received some money after his grandmother passed away.

Thanks again to my health coverage, I could get an IUD installed at no additional cost after I had healed enough.

Fast forward two and a half years and we want to complete our family. We do not want our children to be hugely apart in age and I already know about my fertility issues. We decide to remove the IUD and try without any artificial fertility meds. I got pregnant this past February. We had been saving a bit each month to cover the leave because this time we do not have the ingeritance buffer. But then disaster struck. CALPERS, who administers the health coverage, changed the rules on how people on leave pay for benefits. Now I am told that if I want to take any unpaid leave, I must pay the full $1600 monthly premium instead of only the employee contribution or I cannot keep my coverage. There is a lengthy reinbursement process that I must go through, but it requires me to have the time and energy to fill out and wait for paperwork and checks to clear. Chances are, by the time a reimbursement check comes, the next month’s premium will already be overdue. So essentially, I would need over $3200 to leave in limbo while in unpaid status and also trying to pay for rent and food. I am unbelievably lucky that my parents have agreed to let me borrow the money or I would basically have to go right back to work after giving birth.

Cue last week when my cat started having trouble urinating and we had to rush hin to the emergency room. It cost over$1500 to save his life. That was partially money we needed for my leave.

Expenses come out of nowhere, especially when you have pets and children. But sometimes, there are no problems. Surely you would not argue that We should never have anyone special who depends on us just because something bad could happen.

Having children was an important part of my life plan. But my fertility will only worsen as I age because of my health issues and the cost of growing and birthing my own children is still less than the cost of adopting (and don’t get me started on tge classist, ablest and racist issues with the adoption system at large). And sure, I can’t afford a house because real estate is fucking outrageous no matter what anyone says.

If your children are loved, wanted, attended to, fed, clothed and sheltered, then exactly what more do children need for the right of existing?

Private school? Ipads? Designer clothing? A parent who stays home all day? Their own room?

At what point does it stop being concern for the wellbeing of a child and start being about forcing a standard of living steeped in classism and racism upon people in order to keep them powerless and childless against their will?

I do think it’s still an intensely personal choice and that neither I nor anyone else can tell you when you’re in the right place. For instance, someone with more patience than me would not need as much stable, kindly community support as I would need if I ever undertook the task of parenting. But I think the question of “is the kid gonna be happy?” should come far before the question of “does the adult want a kid?”

Falconer – that’s “Her Majesty,” not “Her Royal Highness.” HRH doesn’t apply to the monarch. It’s like calling an admiral a captain: wrong rank.

Oh yeah, isn’t royal highness more appropriate to a princess?

But whadda I know, I’m just a Yank.

@Sharculese, do you have any good links showing the “Go back home” chant? I’d love to use it to settle an argument among “friends” that i know who keep saying it was probably just about the R.P. and not about the P.R., as it were.

@Zanana i’m sorry you had to be subjected to your parents’ cruel words — it sounds like it really affected you. I just think that the best deciders of what to do are the potential parents — because we can’t ask the potential kid, of course, and so they’re the next best experts. But i also think that better social safety nets and resources for struggling families (monetary, emotional, health, and educational support, for example) would ease a lot of parent’s and children’s burdens without having to make anyone else’s reproductive choices for them.

OKAY I’M DONE NOW SORRY GUISE 🙂

It is rude for strangers to ask a woman with a lot of kids “Do you know what causes that?” or “Oh no, you’re pregnant. What are you going to do?”

Ugh, those are the worst! Especially when it’s right in front of the kids. They do have ears, you know!

So I’m not being dog-whistly, I’m just literally thinking of the people I know.

It’s also an observation about a lot of people, not just the ones I know.

Wait, how can it be both?

Zanana, with all due respect, just because your parents made a mistake (in their opinion) doesn’t mean that all other potential parents need to be as paranoid as possible, and not have kids unless they have a cast-iron guarantee that nothing unexpected will ever happen. Especially since such a guarantee would be impossible anyway. If you don’t want kids then that’s a perfectly valid way to feel (I don’t want kids either), but I think it’s pretty shitty to project whatever anxiety your parents cruel words left you with onto other people, especially given that we have at least one currently pregnant regular commenter, and another who recently gave birth.

Damn, I’d be embarrassed for them if I thought they had any sense of shame about their racism.

I expected Zanna’s comment to be extreme (reading backwards). It’s pretty leveled, she says people don’t need to procreate like it’s a given, and that expecting people to prepare for every little thing is unreasonable.

Difficult topic that has to be handled just so, and even when the right things are said, people will act like it’s sacrosanct and you can’t say anything about it. My brother just had the cutest girl ever, my first niece, I’m not going to go over to his house and start an ethics discussion on making new people. Not gonna happen. I’m going to squeal like a proud auntie. At this point the conversations have to stay in the philosophy ethics arena. Any discussion is like ‘don’t judge me or tell me what to do’. Most people have kids, I’m not going to judge them one iota. It doesn’t help and makes no sense. I do want to mention something that I hope is taken ok, though. I’ll just give an example of what happened years ago on a message board. People brought up the ethics of McDonalds and one popular poster there shouted it down with this great argument I LIKE MCDONALDS!! She thought that was a valid argument, and the other posters followed suit. No more discussion. The fact that some people do something or like something is a cheap out and is most of the time meaningless and coercive. However… on sensitive topics we should make sure to be super duper understanding that the topic won’t be well received. Also some people are just going to shove you around no matter how well you talk about it, because they want to and they can. No use trying in an environment like that.

@heidihi- If it helps, I did two things to help my fertility- I started taking 1000mg of metformin twice a day to lower my insulin resistance (which works against you by raising your testosterone levels). I also started eating a low-glycemic-index diet to help mitigate the insulin resistance problem. This helped lower my testosterone levels and after some regular unprotected sex, I found myself pregnant. Actually, to be honest, I didn’t find out I was pregnant until I was about 20 weeks into the pregnancy. I didn’t have bad morning sickness, and what nausea I did have coincided with the flu season as well. However, I always take my morning ladyvitamin, and if you’re actively trying to get pregnant, it’s a good idea to take a prenatal vitamin just in case. In my situation, I was desperately craving tomatoes, which apparently have a lot of folic acid, and baby was just fine (in fact, she’s asking me right now if the cat eats cookies or not, and no, cats do NOT eat cookies in this apartment, lol).

Also, even more miraculously than me- I have a friend who is bio-female but identifies as genderqueer whose partner is bio-male, and they got pregnant even though my first friend has such severe PCOS that they can regularly grow a beard without too much effort and was not taking any special medication when pregnancy happened. They have an adorable little boy who is very very loved and doing really well, even though both of them did have to take advantage of various social assistance programs because their finances are not nearly as stable as mine.

And I know I’m not perfect- a lot of people think that I’m too “permissive” because I don’t believe in corporal punishment and I would rather take my kid and sit her down for a “break” than a punitive time out. We can’t afford to rent or buy a house, so we live in a one bedroom apartment. But we go on a lot of walks to the park and around town- we live in a place that has some of the best weather of anywhere in the world, so being outside is glorious. Our daughter has her own little toddler bed in our bedroom but she generally prefers sleeping cuddled up between my husband and I. I doubt that she’d be in her own room even if we had a bigger place. Both my husband and I work opposite schedules and we ride bikes to work instead of drive so that the car will be home in case the primary caregiver at the time needs to use the car for urgent or weekly chores. We spend a lot of time together as a family whenever we can, and when we can’t, we still make time each day for “I love you”s and hugs and cuddles. We watch a lot of cartoons and cuddle on the couch when we’re home in the evening. Our daughter will go crazy over broccoli for a week and then only want chicken nuggets. She helps both my husband and I out in our little kitchenette. And she enjoys playing dananananananaBATMAN but she also likes to push her baby doll in a stroller. We’re doing everything a day at a time- potty training is almost completely mastered but she didn’t really start wanting to do it until she turned 3, we’re working on numbers and word pronunciation but she’s still begging for a pacifier at night, and even though she still needs some reminders, she is very good with unprompted “please” and “thank you.” She’ll be starting preschool co-op soon, which is going to be a big change- she doesn’t spend all that much time in structured environments (she’s never been to daycare), so I’m concerned that she might have trouble fitting in and adjusting even though I know it’s going to be an essential step.

As you can see, I’m not close to perfect. I like to think that most moms do what they can do to make life as good for their children as possible, but sometimes they don’t have the support, education, or understand how their kids will react to various parenting styles (and in some cases, I’ve fallen into the same problems from time to time too).

I do, however, understand that there are many narcissistic moms and abusive moms and other such moms- I just don’t think that the existence of these people is tied to the MOM part of the equation- that’s who these people are, kids or no kids. I actually had to call CPS on my cousin because she’s engaging in some pretty severe neglect and possible abusive behaviors with her kids. There’s a big difference between making a mistake and getting help and simply taking out your own issues on your kids. And either way, the CPS people will be able to help her either get the help she needs to give her kids the help THEY need, or they’ll take the children from her if she is demonstrated to be unable to care for them. It was still fucking hard as hell to actually call them and make the report, because I like to imagine that most people want to do the best for their families.

But I always get my hackles up when it comes to the admonition that “moms are doing it wrong” and that “children are just so expensive” and “X group of people should not have children” because the truth of the matter is that NO ONE can “afford” most things in life. There are hidden costs in everything, from a house to a child to a computer to a cat. But if we start making designations about “affordability” instead of mindset, attitude, coping mechanisms, and strength of character, we miss some of the most important qualities that make people good caregivers and parents. When you look at the monthly income of a person, it can only tell you how much they make, and while a person making minimum wage is not necessarily going to absorb the costs of caring for a child well, that paycheck is one of the least important parts of being a caregiver.

Sure, all parents get stressed out because parenting is intense and stressful. And it is my opinion and belief that NO ONE should be FORCED into being a parent if they DO NOT WANT TO. Parents should support the childfree and respect their decisions. But in turn, I think that it is downright disrespectful for someone who is not intimately involved in a caregiver’s situation to see one incident of a child having a meltdown in a supermarket and come to the conclusion that the caregiver is inept or “should not have had children.”

Having children really isn’t the problem. The problem is when people are overextended, have insecure support networks, are forced to work but cannot afford childcare (or are forced to pay for inferior childcare where abuse or neglect may occur regularly), and where people have kids because “you just do it” instead of being given options, reliable birth control choices and proper comprehensive sex-ed. Our society needs to give people CHOICES, but not tell them that their choices are WRONG if they make ones that we can’t necessarily say we’d choose for ourselves.

Well, at least, that’s my personal opinion on the subject. >_> *gets off soapbox*