Rilchiam, the only sister *ohne kinder*

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Thread title is from Fear of Flying. Isadora is the second of four daughters. All the others have multiple children, and she is “the only sister ohne kinder”. Without children, as if you didn’t know. I’m the third of three daughters, the only one who’s never even conceived. And the story behind that has been kind of eating at me lately.

Monday of this past week, I found out that a friend of mine is going to be a grandmother later this year. Of course, her daughter and son-in-law have followed the right path. They’re mid-twenties, college graduates, gainfully employed and have a decent place to live. So all my friend has to worry about is, will she be a good grandma? And somewhere during this discussion she said to me, “You know, I think you’d be a good grandma! But…you’d have to be a mom first, and you’re not.”

Yep, I’m 55 and childless. Staying that way because I’m post-menopausal. This does not break my heart, but, I’m now feeling resentful because it seems like the decision was made for me, a long time ago.

1969. MamaRilch: “I’m almost forty; I guess I can stop using birth control.” Two months later: “Oops, I’m pregnant!”

1970. Rilch’s 17 y/o sister goes to prom with her boyfriend; they’re so in love. Two months later: “Oops, I’m pregnant!”

1982 Rilch gets her first period. BATTLE STATIONS!!!

Now, please believe me when I say, I’m not sorry I was educated about sex and birth control. SisterRilch went into that prom night completely blind. No sex ed at school, media aimed at teenage girls had little to no info about sex or birth control, and MamaRilch was too intimidated or whatever to talk about That Stuff. So every time there was a newspaper/magazine article or advice column letter about teen pregnancy, I had to read it. I also had to read all the books, and watch the TV movies and specials. (A lot of that propaganda, I wouldn’t give to a teenager today, but I’ll get into that in another post.)

So I got the message, wall-to-wall and treetop tall: Teen pregnancy is catastrophic, life-ruining, worse than cancer because there’s no shame in cancer. So I was determined never to take that risk. But that last bit never seemed to register with my mom or my sister.

Take the eighth-grade field trip to Big City. Now, Middle Sister went to the same middle school I did, and her eighth-grade class took the same trip*, except they left at oh-dark-hundred and came back around midnight. Sounds ghastly, and I guess the school thought so too, because when it was my turn, the plan was to stay overnight. But when my mom found out about that, it was like when Lex Luthor sees “Otisburg” on the map. “Overnight?! Overnight?! OVERNIGHT?!”

I did get to go, but only after she had made a complete Karen of herself, calling the school and demanding to know what they thought they were doing, taking a bunch of children to a motel, and yadda yadda. Well, as it turned out, all anyone did in those OMG MOTEL ROOMS, was eat a lot of junk food and watch Saturday Night Live. But when I got back, she kept interrogating me, and when she found out, “The chaperones were walking up and down the balconies all night,” she jeered with laughter. Woo hoo hoo! Obviously, the entire class had been all set to have a drug- and alcohol-fueled orgy, but the teachers were too smart for us! Bwa-ha-ha! Seriously, she told my sister, she told her friends, anyone she could gloat to, that I/my classmates couldn’t get away with anything! (As it was, there were a few squabbles that got loud and had to be broken up, and at least one person got sick from too much junk food. But I promise you, no one was trying to sneak in vodka and lube.)

And when I was in high school, two decisions were made for me. I was not to get a driver’s license. What, let me drive around and meet boys and get pregnant? And I was not to get a minimum-wage job. Because Sis met her boyfriend/prom date/baby daddy at her first job. So, y’know, it’s a straight shot from making curly cones at Dairy Queen to getting impregnated. There were also a lot of low-level incidents along these lines, but you get the idea.

So I’m frustrated with my then-self, because I really didn’t know what was good for me, and I should have pushed back on some of this. At the time, it was okay. Instead of McDonald’s or Dairy Queen, I did yardwork for one neighbor, and cleaned house for another who was elderly. So I was earning money without having to come home smelling like Mac sauce. And even if I’d had a driver’s license, I knew they weren’t going to get me a car, and I couldn’t afford one myself. A lot of things I didn’t get to do, but I figured I’d catch up when I got to college. Uh, didn’t quite happen that way. Not having a “real” work history was a problem when I started looking for work post-high school. And so was not being able to drive.

Now I wish I’d had this dialogue with my mom and sister, sometime before I was eighteen. (I did have a father, but his issue was that if I got a B, I would never go to college and be a waitress “like your sister!”. Everyone was waiting for me to fail, that’s all.) Anyway, I wish I’d said this:

“Do you think I have shit for brains?” [Wait for them to say, “No no! We think you’re really smart!”] “Well, you seem to think that I’m oblivious to all the books, articles, advice columns, TV movies and specials telling me not to get pregnant, not to mention the example right in my own family. You’re acting as if despite all that, I still think, ‘I’m gonna spread my legs for any guy who winks at me, and I won’t get pregnant because I’m speshul!’ And I don’t see how you could think that of me. Unless you also think I have shit for brains.”

“But do you KNOW how many teenage girls get pregnant every year?”

“Yes, I do; you’ve never let me forget. And you know what they all had in common? They were all having sex. I’m not gonna have sex. At least until I’m out of high school. Because I do not have shit for brains.”

“But your life WOULD be ruined if you got pregnant!”

“IF. But it won’t, because I’m not gonna have sex on prom night, or any other time during high school. I don’t have shit for brains, you see.”

I should add here that I don’t think my sister ruined her life by getting pregnant at seventeen. She didn’t finish high school on time, but she got a GED. She got married, had the baby, got divorced when my niece was about a year old, and brought her to our house for a while. Next thing I know, “Starla” is living with her other grandparents, and her father is living nearby. Not sure what the official custody arrangement was, but at any rate, my sister was pretty much out of the picture. Got her own place, started working, started dating a new guy. It was all good for a while…then she made some bad decisions. Including never using that GED to go to college, even community/part time. Still, it was not lost on me that she started to get on an upward trajectory after effectively giving up her daughter.

And I’m, maybe not resentful, but it’s a big what-if that my biological clock never kicked on, I’m sure because of this. Maybe if things had been different, I’d be posting about my awesome kid/s. But those two made me so paranoid, like it didn’t matter what I wanted or planned to do or not do; the Preggo Monster was going to get me when I least expected it, and I wasn’t going to like anything that came next. So when Mr. Rilch and I were first common-law married, then legally married, I was sure that a pregnancy would ruin everything. I know it’s scary for any young couple when they find out Their Lives Are About to Change. But I had been conditioned to think that this was a problem with no good solution, something I couldn’t make the best of, and so I was primed to not deal with it. I never got past the mindset of, “If the stick turns blue, I have failed.”

The pregnant-teen scare stories did their job too well. They convinced me not only that it would be terrible to have a baby when I was underage, it would be terrible to have a baby ever. They all made pregnancy sound like the absolute worst thing, physically, mentally, socially, in every way. Well, okay, the second-worst. The real worst is having a baby that does nothing but eat, sleep and mess its diapers. So how was this something to look forward to? (Y’know, I seem to remember being somewhat unsympathetic, in my thirties, towards people who were having fertility problems. I think I acknowledged at the time that it was my hangup, and I wasn’t trying to make anybody feel worse. But I’ll apologize again to anyone I offended then.)

I’m gonna have to bite the bullet and talk about this with my therapist. We’ve been doing good together, but earlier, I passed on a chance to discuss this with her, because at the time, she was visibly pregnant. (Healthy boy, more of a toddler now.) I know, she said she doesn’t take anything personally, but I would have felt like a heel saying “I’d just as soon have a Xenomorph chest burster inside me as a baby inside me,” to someone who did have a baby inside her. But now I’m thinking, since she knows what pregnancy and childbirth is like, she could give a positive report!

*I once told Middle Sister the above anecdote. She mused, “If we’d stayed overnight, there probably would have been people sneaking off to smoke pot.” Me: “Would anyone have snuck off to hook up?” Her: “In the eighth grade?!”

2

“I can always adopt, and you can always try to shut the fuck up.”

3

So…you really are second guessing your decisions not to have children? Is that what you’re saying?

I hope you’re doing ok?

We all have regrets. I’ll never regret my children, personally. But I do question my decision making, at the time.
It was a real ordeal for me to get pregnant, stay that way and come out alive with a live baby.

Now that I’m dying the decision may have been unwise to have these children. I don’t want them feeling pain, but they will.

It’s all because of my need to have babies, one time over 20 years ago.

4

Thanks for sharing. There’s not doubt that being a teenager is hard. The only thing harder than being a teenager is being the parent of a teenager. Parents know from personal experience that even a normal sex drive can cause havoc for everyone involved, and they will do or say anything to keep their precious daughter from making a mistake she may never recover from.

One strategy is for parents to provide kids with birth control knowing they can’t watch them 24 hours a day… and that boys will be boys. While doing this implicitly gives the kid permission to fool around, at least there won’t be a pregnancy, assuming the kid uses the birth control. Being a boy I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant, and being social award until college the opportunity to get someone pregnant would never arise. There is no right way to do this from a parent’s perspective. Being overprotective can lead to problems and ignoring the possibility can lead to a grandchild.

It sounds like you don’t regret not having kids, and I think that’s a healthy attitude that most women never even consider, especially if they get pressure from their parents to produce a grandchild as soon as they get married. After college I got married, had a daughter, and then got divorced two years later. Not wanting to go through that again, I was single for 15 years. To make sure there wasn’t an oops I had a vasectomy when I was 31 and never looked back. Getting married again, having a second kid, and going through another divorce wasn’t in the cards for me, and I never regretted that decision. I did remarry in my mid-40s. and the woman I married had teenagers so I got to deal with all of the various issues you raised. Everything turned out fine with the kids, but a year ago I broke up with my wife and I am once again living alone. Life is too short to regret any life decision you make. Just look forward, and keep walking.

5

What? No, she knows…well, she doesn’t know this whole story, but she knows I’m okay with being childless. Was just an offhand remark: too bad I couldn’t skip a step.

dolphinboy, I knew someone would go there. Yes, there are a lot of good strategies. Treating your daughter like she has shit for brains and you can’t trust her as far as you can throw a (pregnant) elephant is not a good strategy. This “protection” came at the cost of my development being stunted in too many other areas.

Beck, I’m sorry for your troubles.

6

Okay, so all the media I consumed on this subject. Again, I’m not sorry I got facts, such as “You sure can get pregnant the first time,” and “Here’s the average cost of raising a child from birth to age 2.” But there was also a moral slant to a lot of it that I didn’t like even then.

Like Teenage Lament. Little Miss Attitude thought she was sooo smart, and no adult could tell her anything. Then “one hour of pleasure” and look at her now! Except I knew even then, it was not always pleasure for the teen mom. Some girls are coerced.

As in the magazine article, “A Mother at 13”. (I think that one was purely scare propaganda, like they scouted for the youngest teen mom they could find.) A twelve-year-old is impregnated by a sixteen-year-old. Okay, that sounds rapey. A lot of the advice-column letters about girls who were afraid they were pregnant, were pregnant and very very afraid, or who had carried their pregnancies to term, were from girls who, if you read between the lines, had been date-raped. Except that term was unknown then.

And some of those letters were from teenage guys, very smug ones, who as good as said, “When I go out with a girl, I push to see how far I can get. Just to make sure she’s a nice girl, mind you. If she gives in, she’s a dirty girl, and what happens next is on her. Including the fact that I’m going to tell everyone I know all the details of what she let me do.” Again, sounds like date rape, but it used to be perfectly acceptable. Girls were either virgins or promiscuous. Boys were either virgins or lucky.

And of course the responsibility is entirely on the girl. “I am so old, and I was never young.” Where are the laments from the baby’s father? “She told me she didn’t think she was ready, and I didn’t listen. Now she tells me she thinks she’s wasting her life, and I don’t listen.” Or from the parents, who provided no guidance and made the kids terrified to ask for help, or from the school that didn’t teach sex ed?

And then pregnancy is always described as sheer hell, only a shade worse than caring for the baby after it’s born. The testimonials from the girls who’d had babies, whether married or unmarried, were always given when the baby was <2 years old and screaming its lungs out 24/7. I never seemed to hear from the 22 year-old parent of a five-year-old who said, “Well, the first few years were rough, but now my awesome child is in school full time, and I’m in school part time, and things are looking up!” No, it’s like when Marge Simpson was pregnant with Bart, and Dr. Hibbert gave her a pamphlet. “So You’ve Ruined Your Life.”

One article stated, “When a teenager gets pregnant, she automatically has 90% of her life’s script written for her.” Meaning an endless cycle of poverty, no hope for advancement. Well, society wrote that script, but it’s been open to change since 1970. My sister wasn’t allowed to attend school once she started to show. In my high school, in the mid-1980s, pregnant girls were allow to attend until a certain point (third trimester?) Then they went to alternate school with a nursery. I mean, this wasn’t the rule, but the system wasn’t giving up on them. And again, not that I had any intention of doing that. Just saying, they seemed to be invested in their and their child’s futures, not saying, “Well, my life is over, so I’ll resign myself to always pushing one with another on the way.”

Again, I’m not sorry I was given factual information about how not to get pregnant. I’d do the same for any kid of mine, if I’d had one. But some of that stuff really warped me. For all that, though, I don’t remember any of this propaganda saying, “If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t get a driver’s license. And don’t get a minimum wage job.”

7

It’s obvious you’re upset about some aspect of this situation. But I’ll be damned if I can parse out the complaint from the history recitation. Probably I’m the obtuse one here. I’m trying to be supportive, but I can’t figure out what to support.

Or is the whole thread a primal scream and the (completely legit) point is simply to let the scream pour forth and hope catharsis is the result?

FTR: I’m a childless guy and have had years to think about a) how to avoid pregnancy; b) do I/we still want to avoid pregnancy, or seek it out?; c) well, that’s never gonna happen; now what? d) who will care about me, much less for me, in my old age?

All scary thoughts in their turn.

8

Moms are evil. They often do evil things to their kids.

They will remind you of their sacrifice for you and deny evil doings til the day they die. Count on it. It’s the mothers revenge. And it bites. Hard.

On the other hand, being a kid of a hard Mom can leave you traumatized.
Seriously, needing mental health pros, PTSD.

Stop the madness.
Get off that train.

You can only be responsible for your own actions. Whichever person you are.
The Evil, vindinctive, Scared(yes scared) Mom.

The sensitive, smart, taking it all in(and will end up ok, and getting mental health treatment)kid.

Or…the uninvolved, really, but caring Bystander.

Take responsibility for your own life and consider how YOU affect others around you.

9

  1. My sister got pregnant at 17, due to no one having told her anything about sex or birth control. Not great, but not the end of the world, especially since it resulted in the birth of my niece*.

  2. Her life was not ruined, because she stepped out of a custody loophole. Pretty good for all concerned.

  3. I was given a heavily detailed education about sex, birth control, and family planning. Good; seriously, no snark.

  4. That wasn’t seen as enough. It was decided that the only feasible way to keep me from getting pregnant before high school graduation was to try to keep me 12 years old until graduation. Not. Good. And the reason I still don’t have kids now. As well as the reason for a lot of other not-good things.

  5. A lot of anti-teen-pregnancy propaganda pre-1990 was heavily biased, often pro-life farrago.

*Oh yeah, my niece. Who I adore, who was my best friend for a time, with whom I had the closest to a “real” sister relationship I’ve ever had. Her birth was a good thing, when it all shook out.

10

And look, you’re okay too. :blush:

11

I had a sheltered childhood. I was afraid to learn to drive too, and that was fine with Mom. However, I did have shit for brains, and got knocked up the first time at 17. I never wanted kids, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. So I had an abortion. When I was 18, I got knocked up again (see above, re shit for brains). I had another abortion. When I was 19, I got knocked up again. (All together now, “shit for brains!”) This time, I dimly realized something wasn’t working out, so I decided to do nothing. I didn’t tell anyone either. It was my secret for about seven months. Five weeks later my daughter was born.
Um, I forgot my point. I think it was, I never wanted kids, it was a nightmare, but in the end it turned out okay and I love them. We all have regrets though,
don’t we? Sometimes I wonder what I could have done if I didn’t have kids, but probably nothing much
( :poop: :brain:). Next life, I’ll try something else.

12

You are far from alone in that wish, no matter how well or badly your current attempt was or is going.

Thank you for having the bravery to share. Hugs. The friendly supportive kind, not the creepy old guy kind. :wink:

13

Thank you, @LSLGuy .

14

It sounds like you got helicopter-parented before that was a common thing, and most people agree that it’s bad: kids need to learn age appropriate responsibility, not be sheltered from every risk. It sucks that that happened to you.

The sex-ed I got in the 90s wasn’t pro-life, but it was still heavy on the ‘babies ruin your life’ message, which I now think is a shame.

If you now want to get to know some kids and hopefully have a positive impact on their lives, maybe you could volunteer as a scout leader or something of the sort?

15

Funnily enough, later this week I will be going to a PTA meeting, even though I am neither a P or a T. Another friend – not the one who’s about to be grandma, but someone with kids currently in school – is going to introduce me. “They need volunteers who don’t have to work around their own kids’ schedules,” she told me. So we’ll see!

And again, to anyone who still wants to wag their finger at me and say, “They only wanted the best for you!” Protecting teenage girls from pregnancy is just fine. It’s better than fine; it’s marvelous. As long as they still get to be teenage girls. Trying to keep them at age 12 all through middle school and high school is damaging, not protective.

Anything can be bad if it’s pushed too hard. There are a lot of benefits from children and teenagers playing sports, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to be a psycho hockey dad.