Please don't feel pressured to have a child. I didn't till I was in my mid-30s, and my daughter's a wonderful, funny person. But I'm also a single mom without family support, and I can tell you it's unbelievably hard. I was actually pretty well-prepared for single motherhood (except for the unexpectedly awol family) - great education, property, I felt good and was healthy, and I've got a lot of energy. It's still crazy hard and unrelenting. I haven't had aa regular 7-8 hours of sleep in a decade. Frankly, every mom I know is worn down to a tiny little nub - there's huge, blinding sentimentality surrounding the work we do and the s**t we put up with.
It took me seven years to find a job flexible enough to cope with school snow days, sick-kid days, etc. And the pay's bad enough that I still have to freelance on the side.
What you have to remember is that once you make the choice, there's no going back, and you're the responsible party for at least 20 years or so. Longer if your child has any kind of physical or developmental problems. If your kid also has AS, you'll be working with school therapists who may have ill-informed views of AS, but they'll be the experts, not you, and you'll have to take them seriously and deal with them carefully.
When you have a kid, you're also responsible for making your child's social world happen for over a decade, then vetting and overseeing that social life for another 5-6 years, meaning you must get in there and be social with the other moms, or find someone else to take over that job consistently. For a very long time, your life will be organized by the school district, scouts, swimming lessons, music lessons, homework assignments, orchestra, whatever cockamamie curriculum they've got this year, tests you don't care about, college applications, waivers, etc., etc. Kids come with huge paperwork. And this is if all goes well. If it doesn't, things get more complicated (and expensive). And if you wind up single, you'll do all that while holding down a job. You might need a job anyway, because presumably this kid will one day go to college, and you probably won't want him or her to start adult life saddled with a mortgage's worth of debt. Where you live will be determined largely by the quality of the local schools.
You'll say to yourself, oh, all that stuff's unnecessary. And you know what? Most of it is. For you. But if you have a sociable kid, you've got a problem, because it's what all the other kids are doing. So you'll make it happen for your kid, too. I mean really, do I need a 3BR house and a yard? I'm happy in a dorm room, and think carpeting the world in Kentucky bluegrass is totally stupid. But the kid needs her own room, and we need to be able to have people over, and kids can't walk everywhere so you need a car and a place to put it, and, and, and.
Sexism also comes into play. The unhappy fact is that women are held to be the responsible parents. There's a lot of AS guys who have kids, but mostly it's the moms doing the childrearing and child-related work. If you're an AS woman, you'll still likely be the main parent.
What you're doing when you have a kid is choosing a financially-nonpaying 24x7x365 job, a set of relationships, and a way of living for the next 20 years or so of your life, minimum.
Is it rewarding -- hey, I got very lucky, my kid's a terrific human being and very, very easy to get along with -- sensible, quiet, smart, fun. And healthy. But a lot of kids are significantly more challenging, and yes, you can have a fine life without children. If you love kids -- man, there are so many kids out there who need a stable extra adult in their lives, someone who'll really be there for them and listen to them, help them learn things, just be kind to them. Think it over really carefully before committing to it yourself. You have to be willing to center your life around your child(ren) for the rest of your life. It might be necessary.
02 Mar 2014, 12:32 pm
