I remember Lynn giving that as the reason she’d never really been happy about having a child, even though her daughter had been healthy, intelligent, and eventually grown up into a wonderful young woman: she just never stopped stressing over her.
Think about the genetics of it: your kids will be half you. Your neices and nephews are a quarter you. That’s not a huge difference, really.
I wish my daughter had loving aunts and uncles - biological or not - because they can make a huge difference to a child’s life. I didn’t have them, either, but I see my childless friends posting about taking their neices and nephews on holiday, taking them out, just being there when they’re needed (if they live close enough), and while I know that it’s not the same as parenting, my friends really love their niblings (a term coined by a childless friend with a lot of neices and nephews) and they are heartily loved back.
As you can see, I have a child, but I’ve always wanted more. Wanting a second kid is not the same as just wanting to have a kid, but I think there are some similarities. Having neices and nephews does comfort me somewhat for the reasons given above (and they’re only one-eighth me, since their parents and I share only one parent) even though I never see them. It’s still like there’s a bit more of me to go around.
The neices and nephews of my childless friends are extremely lucky, living in a circle of love and support and fun-having times, much of which is provided by their childless aunts and uncles.
The childless friends also have more money, free time, etc, everything that’s been mentioned above, but the important thing (when it comes to this subject) is that they also have significant input into children’s lives. The children don’t forget it.
Lynn’s post. WARNING: NSFW, contains allergens, may cause heart to skip beats.
Given that Lynn is not around to add any yeahbuts to those posts or talk in person to her daughter to explain them, and her daughter might be reading posts in which her mother the former admin of this site is referred to, I don’t think you should have posted that.
They’re also utterly irrelevant to a thread where someone wants kids but can’t have them.
I got to be a parent for about 4 years. It’s definitely not what started the relationship but what ended it.
Backstory: About 9 years ago, I met a guy who was divorced and had shared custody of his three children with his ex-wife. They were 5, 6, and 13 at the time. In the four/five years we were together, the ex-wife’s drug and alcohol addiction coupled with her unwillingness to work, her subsequent poverty and health problems due to her gastric bypass made her less and less in the picture. She ended up dying a couple months after my ex and I broke up. We ended up having the kids full time.
Now, instead of trying to tell a cohesive story, I’m just going to make it a list about the benefits of now not having children.
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I’m selfish it turns out. I like downtime, me time, alone time. That all went away. There’s no privacy.
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There’s no fragile thing anymore that won’t probably be broken.
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Your schedule is now all them which includes all of the things they will forget. OK, so here’s when these two go to school, the other needs a ride there and then pick this one up here to take them to after school class there and make sure to have dinner ready by here for two of them but remember that the third won’t be home til later and that someone might be coming over .
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Oh, then there’s homework. Even at 5 years old they were coming home with an hour or two of homework. Now fit that in between making sure they’re active and that you know how to help with the homework and gahforbidit if you don’t have the construction paper/glue/scissors/internet/printer/paper/pens/et al to do it with.
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Religion. I sure hope that you and your partner not only see eye to eye on your exact views but also you agree how to raise them and tell them what’s what. We were both atheists, but he wanted the kids raised Jewish because that’s what he was. He didn’t believe in God but wanted the kids to and his ex-wife was Lutheran so the Jewish kids shouldn’t have Santa Claus spoiled for them either.
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I remember my parents having the exact same argument. My mom would yell at my dad “I’m always the goat and you’re always the hero”. I think I had the exact same line echo out of my mouth when I set boundaries and my ex would cross them to be the hero for the kids. It made me feel like an asshole.
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How do you deal with irrationality? Trying to properly handle a 15 year old girl screaming and literally crying because she deserves a smart phone instead of the flip phone that she got 6 months prior (the one where she promised that we would never have to buy her another gift-everever). Yeah, it’s easy to laugh at now but at the time, in the middle of a restaurant with some friends I hadn’t seen in a while? Not fun.
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Dealing with the lazy co-parent. How do you get your partner to actually stay involved instead of letting you handle everything. My ex smoked pot. A lot of it. I never did, it just never interested me. But since he did, it meant that he would spend more time in his car before coming home. Or instead of trying to teach the kids to ride a bike, or learn resilience instead of giving up, or doing homework, or cooking dinner for everyone, or cleaning the house, or…well you get the point.
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How to resolve a problem. The main reason we broke up was the kids. More specifically, it was the fact that the three kids were (and still are) morbidly obese. When the oldest turned 16 years old, she was 5’2" and 255 lbs. The other two are on the same trajectory. They would stop off at his family restaurant after school and have a dinner amount of food and then have a real dinner a couple hours later. After years of me trying to rein in the obsession with giving the kids too much food and not enough exercise, I Just. Couldn’t. Do. It. Any. More. I couldn’t fight the good fight and decided my sanity was worth more than their health or this relationship.
I’m lucky in the fact that I was able to just walk away from the whole thing without any strings.
No, it’s not irrelevant. It’s not the same situation, but it is an example countering the way society bombards women with the wonders of motherhood and assure them that once they get married/pregnant/have the kid they will love the little darling and everything will be paradise.
If you don’t have kids you won’t ever have certain types of regrets. You might (probably will) have other types of regrets, of course, but life is like that, you can’t take every fork in the road.
I also think you’re attempt to bury Lynn Bodoni’s post off base as well, as she state in that very post that she wants to speak out to let other people know this happens, and people who feel like her to know they’re not alone. Could her kid read that one day? Yes. You know, I’ve found out some very unflattering things about my parents over the years and yet I’m still humming along and it didn’t screw up my relationships with them. In fact, Lynn’s kid probably does know the story at this point.
As it happens, I know I’m the product of failed contraception as well, my parents did not want another child during a financially difficult time for them when they already had three kids. Nonetheless, here I am and they did the best job they could raising me. They were far from perfect, of course, as parents are merely human, but learning that didn’t cause a problem between us.
I honestly don’t see how someone having a kid when they didn’t want to is relevant to this. She wasn’t even discussing the pros and cons of having a kid in those posts, just that she personally didn’t want to.
And now that she’s dead, and it’s pretty recent, she can’t talk to her daughter about those posts. It seems tactless at best to draw attention to them. Which we are also doing now, so I’m going to stop.
3 points:
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The OP wanted to hear from all sorts of childless people, not just people in exactly her situation.
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Why do you assume this never came up between Lynn and her kid? We have no way of knowing.
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It is a public post on a public message board, accessible to anyone who knows how to google. I don’t see “poster is dead” as putting it somehow off limits. YMMV.
Since we have ‘no way of knowing’, it would seem prudent to err on the side of caution, it would seem to me. Especially as it’s only really tangentially related to the OP’s issue.
Hi again: I was thinking about you all night. I just wanted to give you a little more information. This is all my opinion:
Having a baby is beautiful - No it is not, it is pretty gross. I never had a desire to watch someone give birth, and I have 4 sisters. I do not care what anyone tells you, delivering a baby is not beautiful. You are in an akward position for hours, with doctors and nursed looking at your vagina for hours. Then when your water breaks, it is really, really gross. Then when I started pushing the baby out, I had a nurse who kept asking me if I wanted to see, that she can hold up a big mirror for me. Hell no, I do not want to see something bloody coming out of my vagina! It guess a lot of people do, but lets get real, it is not a pretty sight. :smack:
There is no bond stronger than a mother and a child - I call BS on this one also. Sure, I love my children, however, I also love my nieces and nephews. The whole “greater love” thing is a myth, love is love.
I am really close to one niece and one nephew, even though I have many. When they were young, I loved them very much, and enjoyed watching them grow up. They are now adults, but my love for them has not changed, I still love them the same as I love my own children.
One more thing, that a poster already wrote that I strongly agree with. The poster said how much he loved his dogs, they were like his children. I 100% believe people who say they love their pets as much as they would their children.
I had two beautiful cats, Charlie and Andy. They are gone now, but I miss them. They were soooo special to me, and I use to love them just as much as I love my kids now.
Please do not buy into the hype of how beautiful childbirth is, that you form a special bond like no other, and that you will never have regrets.
One more thing, I can understand you wanting or thinking about having children to help take care of you when you are older. I do not know why posters gave you a hard time about that, everyone has their own different reasons for having children, and most of them are not selfless.
As far as helping you in your elder years - I have six siblings. My Mom was diagnosed with dementia, and was told she could not live alone. I pleaded with my brothers and sisters for help, and it is a long story, but no one would help. My Mom fell last year, hurt her head really bad, and eventually die from her injuries. So, I would suggest you do not count on your children for help when you are older, get something in place for down the road in life.
I will shut up now, I hoped this thread has helped you at least a little bit. 
Oh my, I read this post and laughed. You do not see the “poster is dead” as relevent to sharing said death persons information? Really? If you honestly do not believe this, please look up the word “tact” in the dictionary. 
This is a horrible post that should not be pulled up again. For cripes sake, what kind of person wants to know that her mother hated and resented her even three decades later? It’s not nice. It’s not appropriate. It is incredibly tactless, especially in a thread where someone is upset over the prospect that she may never have children and admits she wants them. Leave it alone. FYI, I liked Lynn. I thought she was a sweet person. But there are some things that should probably be dead and buried forever besides people.
I don’t agree with the last part. Lynn already put that out to the universe for her daughter and anyone else to read. It’s not like Nava put any words in her mouth or took anything out of context that could be misinterpreted.
I do agree that Lynn’s situation is different from the OP’s in that she obviously didn’t want a kid and the OP does. However, her story corrects a common misconception. No, simply having children doesn’t transform you into a Mother Goddess overflowing with nurturing wholesome goodness. Your personality flaws/hang-ups/quirks don’t magically disappear once you become a parent. And being a parent doesn’t mean you aren’t a “cold and callous” person. The OP needn’t feel like she’s missing out on becoming a better human being just because she can’t have kids.
Lynn didn’t seem to have a very happy life. Now maybe she would have been even unhappier without her daughter. Who knows? But she certainly didn’t seem to think so.
My therapist said a while ago that I have a tendency to feel the pain of others very acutely. I think it stems from my feelings of solidarity- “none of us is free if others are not,” etc. Reading this has brought up those feelings. It’s a bit disturbing to read many of these posts. This is partially due to my empathy for those writing them, as well as for anyone else trapped in these situations (including the kids), combined with palpable relief at my own preemptive escape from this trap (I got a vasectomy with no trouble shortly before turning 31; before that I knew that combining a condom with coitus interruptus is virtually foolproof, as is combining multiple contraceptive methods more generally), and a vicarious horror and sadness directed towards anyone forced into parenthood due to a lack of autonomy.
She also has told me on several occasions that I made the right decision to not have children. This happens after she takes phone calls in the middle of the session, as our sessions occur as her son gets out of school, and there are inevitable logistical problems. “I’m sorry, I have to take this…”
THIS.
The freedom to do what you want, when you want, twnety-four-seven - not counting working for a living, of course.
Priceless. 
To be fair, none of is addressing the good parts, since that’s not really appropriate for the OP.
Full disclosure: I’m not a big “kid” guy. It’s not that I hate kids, but I see them the way I see adults: some are great, and some are great big pains in the you-know-what. If you want me to leave an area, though, introduce an out-of-control screaming kid to it. Even wasps and hornets won’t get me scurrying as quickly as that will!
My wife and I have had very little help from our family. The help we did have, however, made everything so much easier.
Our friends have been amazing. They were there to babysit when I had a job interview and my wife was working. They made us dinner the first two weeks from the hospital, they let my wife and I go to a concert I was really excited for.
Nothing is stopping you from being that friend. You’ll forever be a hero in the eyes of the parents.
Also, my daughter doesn’t like people. But she likes my one friend who’s watched her before. She doesn’t even like her own grandmother.
My wife would echo that sentiment. There are several people she knew before she met me that she used to hang out with quite a bit. She doesn’t hang out with them nearly as much now as she used to partly because we don’t live as close to them anymore (as she used to), partly because she now has ME in her life, and partly because, even before she met me, she started to lose interest in their lives because of all their talk about their kids which she didn’t (and still does not) have. Bingo.
I’m so sorry for your loss of this dream, EmAnJ. 
Infertility is heartbreaking.
To answer your question: I’m childless (still fairly young though), and I will be perfectly content if I never give birth, and I am not interested in pursuing straight adoption though I have always been interested in being a foster parent someday. I love kids, had younger siblings I helped care for, childcare was my first paid work, and I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of parenting. The older I get, though, the more I realize what an immense sacrifice having children is, and the more appealing never doing it looks.
Children can surely can be immensely fulfilling at certain times, but are a huge amount of work, stress, very expensive, and cause much day-to-day strife in their parents’ lives and within a marriage. Furthermore, you can do your best job trying to raise and love a child, and sometimes even if you do it all ‘right’ you end up having to deal with an adult with myriad serious problems that the world considers your responsibility to some degree, even into their 20s and 30s - and they may hate you. Children can bring great joy, I know that, but they can also break your heart more horribly than probably anyone else.
As a woman, if you don’t give birth to children, your physical health and appearance is usually better. You don’t go through pregnancy and birth with all the issues they can cause. You can get regular sleep. You have more time and money to exercise, and eat well.
Your quality of life is undoubtably better. You have time to relax. You can focus extra energy on your career, on improving yourself, and on your marriage/relationships. You can choose where/how to spend your money.
You have ease and freedom to make the best life for yourselves, essentially, that you do not have once you have a child. Once you have a kid ‘family life’ is all about them.