Nice, but a little bit violent.

Came across this article today through one of my Facebook friends – The Myth of Joyful Parenthood. It basically tells the scientific tale of how parents struggle emotionally and financially when they have kids, yet still say that having kids is the best thing that’s happened to them, and how they’ve tricked themselves into thinking that having kids is the best so that they can deal with that high emotional and financial cost.

I like kids. I taught for nearly ten years. I was an drug and alcohol prevention specialist and an abstinence educator. We were abstinence until marriage, which meant we discussed the benefits of marriage for our students, for their kids, for society, for their future wealth, etc. That also meant we mentioned condoms and other forms of birth control. I spent ten years following the research on birth control and STDs and came to the conclusion that I also did not want to have sex until I was married, which I followed through on.

Before I got married, I wanted kids. Heaps of them. Despite rearing my brothers and sisters, I still thought having kids would be fun. I was hard, but fair and most kids liked me. I’ve always been able to wrangle great bunches of unknown kids and get them in line, a trait I thought would be very desirable as a future parent.

Then I got married. And had sex. And I realized that the things that I enjoyed about being married would be greatly ruined by having kids. I liked the freedom to go out with my husband whenever the whim struck us. I liked only having to cook dinner for two. I liked being able to walk around the house completely naked because it was only us two.

I think it was going to Wild Adventure that made us think about the cost of having kids, especially as we extrapolated that value to other amusement parks, movies, dining, and all the other things we love to do. It was already almost $40 each for us to get into the venue, but add children and the cost went up by almost $60 or more. I couldn’t imagine the people who had two or more kids having to pay nearly $200 to enjoy an amusement park. And the cost of food and drink – being at food events with kids showed me that kids wanted to eat what they see; it also showed me kids were very wasteful – went up astronomically as you added both food and drink to the 2 or more kids you are carting around.

We enjoyed our time at Wild Adventure, especially flowing down the lazy river in our inner tubes. We enjoy our lives together. We enjoy the relative simplicity and the great ease in which we get to be together. And if things go awry, we enjoy that the only thing that we will split is up. It’s not easy being married in this time of changing values. We want forever marriages but we don’t teach the value of meeting/waiting for the right person. We want to place the right value on sex, but we end up going too far in either direction. We place a premium on communication, but we all shy away from opening up to others and we haven’t been taught the value of keeping things shared privately private.

And so goes the ills of society and life. I’m not deciding against kids because my husband “doesn’t want kids” or because “society is so bad”. I’m not going to “change my mind” one day. I’m not going to be “sorry I haven’t built up child insurance for my old age” or any other of the various reasons women older than me give for the wrongness of my choice. But I do remember, every day at 2:30, that it’s time to take my no baby pills. Since I once taught abstinence, I know that birth control pills effectiveness, while high (in the 90th percentile) is not 100%, but I know it gives me a chance at realizing my dream. Not bringing a child into the world.