Any contempt I have is reserved for your ex-husband. He deserves it. You do not. In fact, you never did, because you didn’t willfully marry a loser. That is different than meeting your husband in his current state (not working, living hand to mouth) and then creating a baby with him. I don’t care how lonely you are; don’t recklessly or willfully create babies if you can’t care for them. Ethics 101.
You, on the other hand, are the model for decent and responsible behavior.
Humans have the ability to pair-bond but no particular inclination to do so for a lifetime. Evolutionary psychology suggests that a part of our mating habits are the result of a continuing cognitive arms race between women, whose main strategy is the quality of resources devoted to raising her children, and men, whose main strategy is putting some resources toward siring a number of children. It’s a continuous tug of war that has resulted in the semi-polygamous society we have today. I say polygamous because it is extremely common for one person, male or female, to have children with multiple partners nowadays. We don’t call it polygamy or polyandry because we sprinkle the magic fairy dust of marriage and divorce over it, but Americans are just as polygamous as other cultures that they like to think are their inferiors.
You know, not every guy who is a loser is a loser all his life.
My mother-in-law married a guy who had a solid career in the military and was a good provider and father until the oldest kid was about 8, when daddy left the Marines and discovered the joys of pickling his brain cells in the local bars. After which he became a terrible drunk, an awful father, an abusive husband, and yes, a deadbeat. There was no way for my mother in law to know, at the time she married him, that 10 years into the marriage he’d opt for booze over all else. Looking at the man after he became a drunk you’d wonder why the woman picked such a piss-poor excuse of a human being to marry, but that would only be because you hadn’t seen him when he was an upstanding citizen.
In other words, don’t be too quite to attribute these situations to “poor judgment” on the part of the mother. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t.
Some people, like JulieFoolie, do indeed end up in a position they could not have forseen.
But we all know people who charge ahead, knocking over red flags left and right as they get into relationships, ignoring all of their friends and all well-meaning advice. They think they can change him - then they get pregnant, and suddenly he runs, and even though he showed every sign of being a terrible prospective father, suddenly they are SHOCKED, SHOCKED, I tell you, and he turns into the most horrible person. And they get hit over the head by every red flag on the way back out.
Yes, accidents happen, mistakes happen, but too often I see people deliberately putting their foot in the bear trap and then crying when it closes. And not just young people, either. There’s something in the idea of “true love” that seems to make people crazy. I wish we’d do a little less romanticizing of relationships as a people, and try and teach a little more self-respect and value to both men and women.
I know, huh?
You’d almost think that women are hooking up with bad boys and other assholes. Inconceivable!
No. And fuck you, you sanctimonious bitch. You yourself had birth control failures and yet you “presume” that your “friend” (some friend you are!) didn’t use any because she had a child?! Fuck you again.
Some of us *were *young and stupid. And some of us were indeed taken in by smooth talkers. And some of those smooth talkers have now CHOSEN to not work to spite their own children. Or they work illegally, for cash under the table, to spite their own children. Yes, they’re assholes - but we couldn’t really know they’d be assholes to their own children before they had any. We ARE victims - victims of men who promised us the world and then broke their word.
Really? REALLY?! That matches exactly *one *couple I know - or did you not notice that the vast majority of people in history DATE and HAVE SEX with SEVERAL PEOPLE before they marry? Some even DIVORCE their spouses and have children with NEW ONES!
“Pair bond” means one sexual mate FOR LIFE. It’s in your own quote. Humans are, at best, serial monogamists. Many, based on DNA tests of children and behavioral studies, are at best *nominal *monogamists - they promise and claim monogamy and then cheat.
I’m so fucking steamed right now I can barely put a post together, so you’ll have to forgive me for not having a good wrap up here. I’m just so very disappointed that one of my favorite posters could have written these posts. Please, go back and think about what you’re saying here.
This is pretty much how I felt about it. Pursuit of “next-to-nothing” would have done nothing in the way of improving my son’s life. He was a little pissed off about it for a while, but I think he’s beginning to see the light. Personally, I didn’t want to be the one to put a non-earner in jail for not paying child support that he didn’t have. By not pursuing it, my son couldn’t be mad at me for putting his dad behind bars, and consequently eliminating any opportunity for him to pay support that he wasn’t going to pay anyway.
Yeah, that pretty much covered it.
-RNATB, child of a not-deadbeat-but-not-exactly-responsible-dad and a phenomenal mother
The thing is, I don’t self identify as “a model for decent and responsible behavior”. I self identify as a single mom who hooked up with a person who already showed signs of being unstable and irresponsible. It got worse, but he wasn’t Mr MBA from Queens University when we met.
I know its a rare* thing on this board, but I was raised in a Christian tradition… a very open minded and small-l liberal Christian tradition. “Whatever you do unto the least of these you also do unto Me.” Or, for those of you who reject Christian teachings, “what comes around goes around.” Or love your neighbour. Or it takes a village… whatever…
I don’t like public displays of poor-me-ism. But I don’t like the idea that only people with “Good Jobs” are allowed to procreate either. Yes, people should get a clue that the couch surfing, heavy drinking, pot-smoking, bad boy is not going to magically change into Clifford Huxtable when the stick turns blue. I’m not in love with the third generation welfare families I see around me.
But people like Punditlisa and Nyctea advocate a slippery slope. So is it mandatory abortions for welfare cases or forcible adoption?
Hmm… here’s a thought. Sometimes, I have sex with people based on my desire for sex. I am not choosing a suitable father and life-partner every time I have sex. And bless your heart if you’ve never had sex with someone who wouldn’t make a suitable father and life-partner. Sounds a little dreary and joyless to me, but whatever makes you happy.
I don’t know, it’s possible to have made poor life decisions and still not shower everyone you know with baby momma drama.
By the way, is that sanctimony extra tasty with the cookie you seem to feel you deserve?
Give the mother the option of both, but if she doesn’t choose then the default should be adoption. IMHO.
I you can’t afford to raise babies, then you shouldn’t be making them. I also thoroughly support long-term birth control options (Norplant? is there a long-term yet reversable option for men?) for all people, men and women, on welfare.
Just so we’re all talking about the same thing, I think the OP was using “pair bond” to mean “mate for life” just as you are, but that is only one kind of pair bonding. Serial monogamy is another kind of pair bonding. Getting married and divorced and hounding 5 baby daddies for child support, well, that’s another kind of pair bonding. From the wikipedia quote, here’s a variety of types of pair bonding:
Another error in that post… those elaborate displays of male bird plumage and song? Has nothing to do with pair bonding. That is purely a competitive display of genetic fitness to convince the female to provide sexual access. There are some edge case such as nest-building displays that show some fitness in the dimension of pair-bonding but these are not the most common situation.
And finally, another error. Those faithful birds that mate for life? Not so faithful for life, actually.
Dammit, missed the edit window.
Of course it is. My daughter’s father is a deadbeat and a loser, and I wasn’t planning on reproducing with him, but sometimes when a mommy and a daddy get very drunk, and a mommy doesn’t realize that her birth control is adversely affected by antibiotics… well, you know.
Thing is, since I KNEW he was a deadbeat and a loser, I simply disregarded him going forward. No contact, no drama, no harm, no foul. Never gave the man a thought for seventeen years, until he contacted my daughter via MySpace. :rolleyes:
I’m not saying that posting bitchy facebook updates about it is okay. She *should *know better than to expect anything from him, and she should have known better at the time, and she made her choices, and she should quit her bitching.
But I’ll eat my stylish-yet-affordable boots if **nyctea scandiaca **has never fucked a man she wouldn’t necessarily want to marry and raise children with. And with her suggestion that the rest of us should feel bad about doing that, she can fuck right off.
We could always go the Indian route of forcible sterilization. That worked well.
I don’t really want to get into this argument, but there are distinct differences between, say,
Etc.
And I don’t think there’s any harm in getting out one’s feelings here and then still being able to respond nicely to the person. It gets difficult when day in day out the person is forever complaining about the injustice of all of the world, and basically claiming he tricked her and knocked her up, and when you realize it’s her third kid achieved in the same way, and you hear the whining ALL DAY, you start to want to slap her.
Yes, I know someone just like this. And no, I don’t advocate any laws for the government to be in the business of making babies or stopping babies or aborting babies - I just want more EDUCATION. Women should be aware of what having a baby entails, and having a baby shoudn’t be made such a big deal of.
Dammit, it looks like I got into the argument anyway. Sigh.
Which makes the mother somewhere around 20 when she got pregnant.
I know that a 20-year-old is a legal adult, but Christ, I was still in many ways a stupid kid at that age. Through a series of events I don’t want to get into here, I’ve recently learned that I am STILL paying the price of having gotten involved with an asshole when I was 19 (I am now 33). My particular burden to bear isn’t a kid, but I can see how it could have been. And I can see NOW what a fucking loser that guy was, but at the time, I couldn’t. I didn’t have the experience to have good judgment about relationships at that age.
Do you have sympathy for yourself at that age? Do you look back at yourself and think, “Yeah, I totally had all my shit together,” or do you recognize that maybe you were still learning a lot about people and the world – not to mention yourself – then?
I agree that there are indeed people who see and even recognize red flags and barrel straight on anyway. But when those people are quite young adults, I allow that they may not have a clear enough sense of what they’re doing. Sometimes they learn the hard way.
And yet here in the real world, people’s circumstances change. I may lose my job. I may get a much better paying one. Ditto that for my husband.
People may truly believe that having someone to love and love them unconditionally will make their life bearable.
And/or they believe that having a baby will create a permanent link to someone they would otherwise lose completely.
And/or their birth control failed and they can’t handle an abortion. Or they decide to give up the baby to adoption but change their minds when the time comes.
Or any combination of factors that lead, down the road, to a single mother having the gall to complain every so often that their kid isn’t getting supported.
You may not understand or condone any of those reasons, but I guarantee you, they’re real and deeply felt by lots of people. And again I have to come back to this particular case, where the mother was 20 when she got pregnant. Frankly, I’ve known lots and lots of 20-year-olds who engage in magical thinking – i.e., “It will all work out.” It’s not well-reasoned or even well-founded, but it FEELS true at that age. This mother is now older and possibly wiser (and maybe not wiser) but she’s not out of line to want child support or to bitch about not getting it.
Yes, yes I know. I just didn’t have the patience to point out errors in terminology when I knew what she meant. But thanks for having more presence of mind than I did.
And, FTR, I haven’t even attempted to get child support in over 10 years, because A) the process was detrimental to my child and B) I knew when I chose to have the child that I was responsible for him should my partner get hit by a bus or otherwise remove himself from our lives. Mostly A. But that doesn’t absolve him from being a shithead for not making payments voluntarily and it doesn’t make me feel any better when someone on a message board tells me I’m not allowed to feel victimized by him - or to make a wry observation about the inadequacy of a $10 child support check - because I was stupid. Of course I’m supporting my kid. Doesn’t mean life wouldn’t be a hell of a lot more pleasant if I wasn’t the only one of us doing so.