drwex | An April First Deliberation (not fooling)

gatopretopointed to this article in Open Salon: Does Having Children Ruin Your Life?

The original article is pretty good, and many of the follow-up comments are pretty insightful.

I'm blogging this in part so I can record my reply, which I first put in a comment to his entry. The following will probably make more sense if you've read the original:

Does Having Children Ruin Your Life?

Mu. Having children means you no longer have the life you had before. You have a new one now. It's passage through a singularity, movement from the tribe of not-children to the tribe of have-children.

One woman told me that while she loves her kids and would never unwish their existence now that they’re here, if she had known what parenthood was like before she had kids, she wouldn’t have done it.

True. I've referred to parenthood as a Faustian bargain, and particularly grown to sympathize with the parts in Faust where he regrets the bargain he made.

...it was almost entirely 1s and 10s afterwards.

True. Particularly true with first children, when every experience is new.

while she generally feels satisfied and happy, at least once a week she wants to abandon her husband and kids and just run away from her life.

True. I have the same feelings and I'm pretty sure Pygment does, too. Parenting doesn't have vacations, generally, though if you're of a sufficiently privileged class you can get someone else to do the parenting while you escape for some amount of time.

The parents I know seem, as a general rule, to be less happy than the non-parents. They are more stressed out, more exhausted, more worried, less fun, less funny, and much more interested in their personal/familial lives than the outside world – at least compared to those without children.

True. See above about Faustian bargains. You give up that externally visible joy for things that the outside world doesn't see. Let me tell you there is NOTHING IN THIS WORLD like the sound of _your_ six-year-old making 'graaargghh!' sounds as he tries to emulate a zombie. The non-parent tribe doesn't see things this way.

I just don’t get it. I’ve never understood it. It truly mystifies me why anyone would want to have children. And I really want to understand.

Why do people drink coffee? It's vile disgusting stuff that has to be doctored heavily to be even vaguely palatable. Why do people eat live bugs? All that mystifies me, too. But I accept that people do it and think it's a good and wonderful thing. Dear lord there are people who SEEK OUT durians! Compared that, child-rearing seems utterly sane.

That said, if you don't want to have kids then please don't. Really. Just don't.

Why have kids when it looks so bad?

Because it's the greatest adventure anyone can embark on. It's a bigger challenge than Everest and has rewards that are literally incomparable to anything else on earth. Because some of us like the idea of family including small growing people and helping them develop into whomever they're going to be. Because we feel the same sort of urges that salmon must feel as they swim against the currents.

It's almost a nonsense question - why do some people believe in God? Um, because they do? Because they can't imagine a world without some incarnation of supernatural Divine? Having kids - or rather the decision to have kids - is a lot like that. You make a mystical leap of faith, believing in something outside of and better than yourself.

(Oh, and the commenter who said that it was like trying to explain sex to a virgin - yeah, that too.)