I have two boys with my wife: one 3 (nearly 4) years old, and one 1-month old. While I love the hell out of them (well, maybe not the constantly crying poop factory so much, yet) I am fully cognizant of what I gave up to have them.
Like to sleep? Ever? Congratulations, you don’t have kids!
Hell Week is probably 1,000 times easier for parents than those who have never had children. Even when they don’t wake you up by screaming louder than any drill sergeant at 03:00, they have irregular sleep schedules.
Except for mornings. Forget about ever sleeping in again. You will be getting up somewhere around dawn (whatever hour that is, and thank all the gods and the leader of your country if you have daylight saving time because otherwise that could be something ridiculous like 04:50 during the summer) for years.
Like having money? Congratulations, you don’t have kids!
It’s the death of 1,000 (financial) paper cuts. There’s no one thing that bleeds you, it’s the incidentals, plus planning for the future. Anything and everything that uses money gets de-prioritized for the kids’ needs.
Like traveling? Congratulations, you don’t have kids!
Luggage increases exponentially. I know what you’re thinking: “What the fuck?! They’re so small!” I have no idea how it happens, since I’m a minimalist traveler by nature, but it’s absolutely true.
I used to visit my family in the US with my wife using one large piece of luggage (usually my 60 L hiking backpack), and one average backpack each, for a 2 week trip. The last time we went, with our then one-and-a-half-year-old, we had my backpack stuffed to bursting, a moderately large suitcase also at full capacity, bags for each of us (including a large bag for the kid) for carry-on, and I think neither my wife or I were carrying more than half of our carry-on in personal items.
We packed even more lightly than normal, so had about 3 days worth of clothes for ourselves, which we planned to launder on the trip. I don’t even want to think about what traveling with two children will be like.
Like spontaneity? Congratulations, you don’t have kids!
If you feel like staying out all night having fun, you can. If you want to go on a spur of the moment trip somewhere, you can. If you want to stay up all night (voluntarily), you can.
With kids, you have to plan waaaaaayyyyyyyyy ahead of time, and then still have everything turn to shit at the last minute. Our last trip to the US involved an emergency re-schedule when our boy had a fever the day before we were supposed to leave. We were lucky enough to be able to push it back by a few days without serious charges, but it was a close thing. We’d made the reservations 3 months before.
If you <maniacal laughter> attempt to do anything without your kids, especially when they’re young, you have to find a sitter you literally trust with their lives, and who is willing to deal with a possible hours-long screaming tantrum. My boy is damn near an angel compared to many kids, but on the couple of times his grandmother has had him overnight — when I was on a work trip and my wife was in the hospital, for example — it was a long time before she was willing to babysit him even briefly during the day.
Like sex? Congratulations, you don’t have kids!
Since my first son was born, I’ve had sex exactly enough times to get her pregnant again, with an intervening fun time oh…about thrice preceding that. I don’t believe I’m exaggerating much, if at all. Look at my kids’ ages and do the math.
Babies seem to have a sixth sense about when parents are potentially creating a competitor for love, affection, and access to all that lovely-lovely lactation, and they react by screaming. Usually at exactly the point where either of you least wants to hear screaming. If there’s anything more boner-killing than seeing your wife leap off the end of your dick like it’s a cattle prod, and run into the bedroom to take care of the baby, I really don’t want to know about it. And the blue-balls aren’t fun either.
Like sanity? Congratulations, you don’t have kids!
Have I mentioned sleep deprivation? Besides that, you won’t have any time you can count on to do things you want or need to do. It’s likely that you’ll only have the use of one arm until the baby begins to crawl, and then you’ll need to pay constant attention to keep it from killing itself. It’s more stimulating than watching paint dry, but only just, and you will be unable to have more than half your attention on anything else if the baby is unconfined and conscious. It’s truly miraculous that any of us survive to childhood, much less adulthood.
When older, children still require and/or demand attention. Hope you like activities and TV programs programs aimed at a mental age of 3–5, because that’s what you’ll be doing or watching every day until they are old enough to go to kindergarten. Forget being able to read (an adult) book, or watch (an adult) program or movie, or do any (adult) activities. If they’re hungry, or tired, or sick, or just in a bad mood, kids are hell to be around, much less take care of.
And there’s the flip side. I’ve never been driven to near homicidal rage (post-puberty) until I had kids. Anyone even looking like they’re thinking of possibly causing harm to your child will have you ready to gnaw your way through the person’s throat, suck out their eyeballs, and skin their corpse with your fingernails if that’s what it takes to protect your progeny. And that might be within nanoseconds of wanting to strangle the damn kid yourself. Emotional stability? Parents haz nun.
Like health? Congratulations, you don’t have kids!
You won’t have much flexible time to work out, though you might be able to negotiate with your spouse to dedicate a set time. Forget dropping in at the gym whenever you feel like it after work or on weekends. You won’t have those anymore.
You won’t be able to use both hands to prepare meals most of the time — without subjecting yourself to the joyful sounds of a screaming baby. Prep for healthy meals will require forethought, logistical planning, and a good dose of luck (now that a dose of laudanum isn’t available to administer).
Might as well forget about eating on any kind of a schedule either. Babies nurse when they want (and believe me, you’ll know when they want) and children take priority if you know what’s good for you. (See: sanity, above.) You might, if you’re lucky, get to finish a meal — eaten in shifts with your spouse — within an hour or two of when you prepared it. I’ve gotten home at 17:30 and finished dinner at 20:30, after the kid is (finally) asleep. And I only have this chaos for dinner since I get up earlier than everyone else for breakfast, and eat lunch at work; my wife has this 3 meals a day, which obviously encourages snacking and eating junk food over more complicated healthy meals.
Did I mention you won’t be getting enough sleep? Yeah, good luck with the increased tendency toward obesity, depressed immune system (complicated by the fact that kids are disease vectors without peer, and we like to put them in [del]concentration camps[/del] educational institutions that seem optimized for spreading infections), and less resilience to stress caused by sleep deprivation.
Oh, stress, there’s a good one. Unless your former job was as an air traffic controller, or armed service member in an active war zone, you probably have never encountered the levels of stress you face as a parent. After (hopefully) keeping them alive through the infant and toddler stages, they keep testing your ability to cope with the unexpected, and (hopefully) maintain their corporeal existence.
There’s a reason people with multiple kids are blasé about things that normal humans freak out about. “Timmy is doing backflips off the roof onto rakes while holding scissors? Well tell him to knock that shit off unless he’s got his homework and chores done.”
On the less light-hearted side, like others have said, you don’t have to worry about the illness, dismemberment, mental retardation, disastrous life event, or death of someone you poured so much time and energy into. I know from experience that loss of a loved one is extremely hard to deal with, but even as a relative newcomer to the parenting thing, I can already see that having something happen to one of my children would be catastrophic.
As much as I love my wife, I think I could cope pretty well after a while. It certainly wouldn’t be worse than when my mother died from cancer when I was 17. But I think I’d seriously contemplate a dive off a building if I lost my son.
Adoption, mentoring, auntie-ing, and other child-related avenues are still open. And, there’s always this option too.