Motherhood....

One of the things I plan on diving into ALL the time is my serious angst regarding children. Not other people's children, but my future children.  That's right, children who don't currently even exist. Today, while reading Clutch Magazine (Great online Mag full of well-written opinion pieces) was a fantastic article about a woman who does not want to be a mother at this moment in time. She talks about how someone regarded that decision as selfish and assumes that as soon as this phase passed in her life, she would be aching to have babies...

You can see my response to the article and the other responses: here.

In response to my response, I found this quote and thought it very telling:

It was palpable, all that wanting: Mother wanting something more, Dad wanting something more, everyone wanting something more. This wasn't going to do for us fifties girls; we were going to have to change the equation even if it meant . . . abstaining from motherhood, because clearly that was where Mother got caught.

     - Anne Taylor Fleming, U.S. author and essayist. Motherhood Deferred, ch. 4 (1994).

As I said on Clutch, choosing to NOT have a child is selfish for who? The woman? If she thinks that she will be happy and satisfied with her life without kids, who are we to judge? Is it selfish to her unborn children? Doubtful. What is more selfish, not having kids when you don't want them or having kids when you don't want them? Children deserve loving parents who even if they didn't plan for them, still WANTED and WANT them. Otherwise, the parents can sometimes resent the children who represent all the things they could have done. Being a parent is a blessing and no one should have children unless they want to.

Finally, what makes a woman selfish for wanting to maintain a lifestyle that she wants? No one says that to bachelors who don't want to settle down. Do we possess some crazy instinctual need to birth someone? Maybe, but probably no more than men  feel the urge to spread their seed into anything with two legs....

PS: In no way am I speaking to parents who did not want kids at a certain time, meaning your babies came before you thought you were ready.