I think for some people life is a competition which sometimes manifests itself weirdly and inappropriately.
Also, for the record, there are parents who deeply love their children who can absolutely bear to hear them cry, and sometimes even laugh about it! But you have never had your own sufficiently funny crying child, so you just wouldn’t understand the depth of their amusement. 
In this case, yes (well, not down to your reductio ad absurdum).
Again, I have, at one point in my life, not had kids. When I didn’t have kids, I had pets. I had parents. I had friends. I would have said, “Yes, I can adequately understand parenthood based on my other experiences.”
And, now that I’m on the other side of that fence, I realize that I was wrong. I was very, very wrong.
It’s interesting how the parents in this thread tend to say, “No, it’s not something you can extrapolate your way to understanding,” and the folks without kids seem to think it is. We all thought we could extrapolate too.
It was rude and unnecessary and irrelevant for her to tell you that, at that point, the equivalent of the combat vet turning to me and telling me I would never understand combat, out of the blue.
But that doesn’t mean she’s wrong.
I believe that, as someone who’s not experienced abuse, I can understand the abuse intellectually–but Anaamika, there’s probably some deep level on which my understanding won’t pass from the intellectual to the visceral. That’s okay. One of the hardest lessons I learned as a teenager was that I could respect someone’s feelings without fully empathizing with them (but by the time I learned it it was too late, I was gonna get dumped).
I don’t understand everything, especially emotional things. I’ll be the first to admit this. But then why are you talking to me about something you know I’m so clueless about it? What’s the sense in that?
That’s what I would have very tempted to ask this woman.
And you know, there are plenty of parents who don’t get what she was talking about. I mean, for every mom whose heart breaks every time their child cries, there’s another mom who doesn’t give a fuck. And a lot of the latter are the kind who walk around talking about how empathetic and motherly they are. Parenthood does not somehow magically endow people with empathy and compassion.
For me (and I only intend to speak for me) it’s not even particularly that I love my kids more than I could ever imagine loving anyone, because I don’t. I mean, I love 'em, but I love my husband and I love my parents, and the love isn’t *that *different.
What’s different is the constant terror. The never ceasing, low level fear that they’re going to die, or be hurt, or hurt someone else, or go hungry or be sad. It’s absolutely fucking ridiculous. I can understand that it’s a hormonal evolution driven thing, but for chrissake’s the older one is 22 now. I should really be able to stop worrying that he’ll get confused in an airport and not know how to fix things if he misses his flight. And yet, every single time, I’m all a fluster until he calls me to let me know he made it okay.
And…like…just this very second after typing that, I developed a new layer of empathy for my mother. Holy crap, that’s why she’s so annoying! :smack:
(I was never an adult without being a parent, so I have no idea how that feels. That’s outside my realm of experience. I literally cannot imagine what people who live alone feel like. I’ve never spent more than two consecutive nights alone in my life. I just don’t…like…what do you *do *all day without other people around? And going out, without kids… Do you actually go out, spontaneously, and do stuff? Like, just call a friend and be like, “let’s go out” and then you go out? Without a plan and a checklist and a week’s notice? That’s…amazing…)
I think her sin was even worse than that: she knew, or should have known, that Anaamika could get it intellectually and could imagine something of how she’d feel. She needed to indicate that that didn’t suffice. Who does that?
Back to my combat dude: if he was telling me that his dog he’d adopted in Iraq was finally being put down, I could empathize with him. If he told me he’d gotten the dog after his first battle and felt a connection with the dog, I’d understand that as an important connection. I wouldn’t know what his battle experience was like; I wouldn’t understand what PTSD felt like. Sure. But if he said, “You don’t know what it’s like,” it’d be unnecessary and kind of rude, and definitely irrelevant to the conversation.
Well, the thread title is “Why do parents feel the need to say such things?” It was not “Do parents really feel this way?”
Regardless of what a parent might think or believe—whether it’s based on experience or not—what a non-parent can or cannot feel, it’s really presumptuous, arrogant, and assholish to let those feelings color your perceptions of another person, not to mention actually give voice to them.
First of all, regardless of your personal experience, you actually cannot predict or read the feelings of another person.
Second, you might not actually know what that other person’s real experiences are. Maybe that person has been a parent, or the equivalent of a parent, and hasn’t told you because it’s too painful, or just none of your business.
And this is over the loss of a pet, something that a lot of people really can empathize with. And just to come out and say “you can’t get it”? Shit. That’s cold and arrogant.
As it is, people without children suffer the pain of a thousand cuts from little slights that make them feel like they’re not rule members of society. And this is in a country in which more than 50 percent of adult women do not have children.
Assholes gotta be assholes; sad people gotta be assholes sometimes too. An asshole or a sad person who’s also a parent is likely to be an asshole in a way that reflects that, just like an asshole who’s a combat vet is gonna reflect that in their assholery.
Is that behavior really all that common, though?(*) I agree that parents commonly say things along the lines of, “As a parent, I really empathize.” Yes, that can come across as a little bit exclusionary toward the child-free, but it’s not that horrible a thing to say, and I would hope most people who don’t have children wouldn’t be offended (based on her OP, I’m guessing Anaamika would take such a comment in stride).
However, I would put the remarks “you wouldn’t get it because you aren’t a mom” and “as a parent I particularly empathize” in separate categories, with the former being much worse. Anaamika, what that woman said to you was totally out of line. If she is not aware that you are childless by choice, it was particularly insensitive - but regardless, it was a dumb thing to say. Perhaps she was just embarrassed at her show of emotion/weakness and felt she had to explain herself.
(*) I was a married childless person for 15 years, and only once do I recall someone saying something that ridiculous to me. I had to discipline and eventually fire a very difficult employee, and she did say to me at one point, “You don’t know how to be a good boss because you aren’t a mother.” Becoming a parent HAS opened my eyes to a lot of things, but I thought at the time that this was a ridiculous comment, and after 17 years of parenting I still do.
I’ve experienced this too with discussing parents, it seems like other people are seeing the world through their own experiences so when encountering a story that doesn’t mesh AT ALL instead of accepting it they try to force it to fit their version of how things work.
But it wasn’t that, she was feeling sad not over the dog dying but because her son was sad over the dog dying.
My wife and I have three sons, my brother and w(b)itch ex have two, my sister has no natural children…but she loves our boys (collectively) as her own, done the special vacation thing for each when they were younger, she and her husband have done Disney with all several times…I could never say to my sister something of the effect, “You wouldn’t understand” because, first and foremost, she is the only daughter of a wonderful mother and father…secondly, she gets it…
My only thought is the lady felt a little uncomfortable sharing so much, and as a way of covering her quick insecurity, said what she did…good for you, no harm, no foul, I don’t think she meant it like it came out and was probably immediately one of those things she wished she had not said…
Flash back to my hometown of Baltimore, 1986, where my friends and I were (and are!) passionate Oriole fans…I was a year or so out of grad school, working full time, and had reverted (along with my friends) back to undergrad partying habits on the weekends…we had secured upper box seats for a Sunday day game late in the summer against the Red Sox, who, at the time, were tearing the rest of the AL East a new one that summer…prior to the game, we had met at an apartment within walking distance to the old Memorial Stadium…and I will admit to fairly copious amounts of a legal drug being imbibed, and plead the Fifth on perhaps some other recreational substances, so we arrived unsurprisingly to the stadium in a fairly high degree of intoxication…
We made our way up the ramps, found our section, walked up the ramp and turned the corner to go up to our seats when I realized we were in a sea of Red Sox hats and banners…being one who always enjoyed jabbing the visiting fans (yeah, I know, the O’s sucked then, but always a supportive fan), I exclaimed as loudly as possible, “FUCK!! WE’RE IN THE WRONG FUCKING SECTION!!” I was surprised when I was not greeted with the expect catcalls and boos and retorts, so we stumbled our way up the upper deck to our seats behind the Red Sox fans and sat down…when I looked down, I realized it was a large group of priests and nuns, all in their outfits and habits, all wearing Red Sox hats and waving pennants…to this day, I feel bad because I just saw the hats…really…sorry…
Sort of.
It depends partly on where you live and what the local culture is.
I don’t have kids, but I do understand that parents live in a different emotional world than I do. It’s like - I don’t have to have a broken arm myself to know that a broken arm hurts like hell (which is not to imply parenting is painful all the time!). I can see that it hurts. Likewise, I can observe that parents are different, and react differently, than non-parents do in some situations. Having observed the grief of parents who lose a child to death up close I can also understand that it’s a level of grief and despair I have not experienced myself, even if I have lost that exact same person (sister and nephew).
What does bother me is when parents consider this to be inherently superior - it’s not, it’s just different. The emotional state of being a parent isn’t always a positive (see WhyNot’s comment about constant worry/terror). Sometimes, you need to be objective and it is extremely difficult, sometimes impossible, for a parent to be objective about a child. There are downsides as well as upsides to parenting. People tell me how joyful they are about their kids, but then I think of one of my sisters who has one dead child and one severely brain injured child… the joyful parts of parenthood are all in the past for her, there is little but grief and worry ahead for her. For the rest of her life.
So, yeah, I get that when your child is hurt/unhappy/sad/crying/ill/etc. it causes you pain. I can see that. You don’t have to underline it by looking at me and saying out of the blue “you don’t get it. You’re not a parent.” That’s a hurtful statement, whether it was intended to be or not. It implies I’m clueless, unobservant, unempathic, and I’m that way because I’m not a parent.
That said, us non-parents are well aware that your parent status occasionally impels you to say clueless things. Just like our non-parent status does the same to us.
On the other hand, I have had people tell me to my face that I could never be happy unless I had kids. That I wasn’t a real woman unless I had kids. That I should abandon my sterile husband for a man who could give me kids, as if they only purpose in life of my best friend was to be a convenient sperm donor for me… these are not kind things to say. Fortunately, they are rare statements in my life but yes, some people are that thoughtless and, dare I say it? stupid.
WhyNot has never experienced being a childless adult. She can intellectually understand what it would be to be a 50 year old woman who has never had children, but she can’t grasp it on an emotional level. Once you become a parent you’d can’t un-become a parent. You might lose your child(ren), but that is different than never having had children. If you had your kids relatively early in life you don’t know what it is to be middle-aged without having had children. It’s a different mental state - neither better nor worse just different. It’s also becoming more and more common these days.
And no, not having kids at 20 isn’t the same as not having kids at 40 or 50. I’m not the same person I was at 20 or 25. At that age I thought I understood what I’d be like later on, but I didn’t, because I hadn’t experienced the years between.
Exactly. And, furthermore, I doubt that the emotional state of any two 50 year old women who have never had children will be identical. Certainly, to take two extremes, the emotional state of a woman who suffered and struggled with infertility and spent tens of thousands of dollars in failed interventions, to arrive at menopause without ever becoming a mother…she’s going to feel a bit different from someone who never wanted children, spent thousands of dollars on contraception, and crossed menopause without children like taking the gold medal. I don’t know either of those states, really, or any others.
I don’t even know what it’s like to become a mother intentionally after you’ve finished schooling and gotten your career started. I only really know one very particular version of motherhood: mine.
I’ve never had to put my kids’ pet to sleep, either. So the lady being rude to the OP might as well have said the same thing to me. In this particular instance, motherhood has nothing to do with whether a person understands what she’s going through.
True. There are a few of us, however, who have lived both child-free and child-encumbered experiences well enough to give us insight into both states.
Take me - I was childless by choice for years and thought for certain that I would never, ever want children. And yes, I endured occasional slights along the lines of, “you don’t really become emotionally mature until you have children,” – but 19 times out of 20, it was my mother who made that kind of remark, and that’s kind of a special circumstance separate from what people in general say. Aside from an occasional asshole here and there, I never felt particularly put-upon because of my choices.
When I was nearly 40, due to a deeply personal set of circumstances that I have shared with very few people, my husband and I changed our minds and decided to become parents after all. As countless others before me have said, it changes you in ways you don’t expect even if you think you grasped what it would be like.
Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of saying it is possible to understand both states - the long-term childless-by-choice and the parent - through personal experience.
As one of the people that has done so, I can’t argue with your post. The only thing I’d take possible issue with is how common it is for parents to feel “inherently superior”. Some do, and they are assholes (and they were before they had kids, too). But most parents treated me just fine when I was childless.
Here’s another thing I thought of last night. So she was talking about how upset her son was, and how upset that made her…and if I had said something like “Oh he’ll get over it” or maybe “You don’t need to cry because your son cries” she’d have every right to say something to me. But I never said a thing. Here’s how the conversation went, it was all her talking:
“…so the dog bill, it’s going to cost X dollars, and if it’s both legs, it will cost 2x dollars. I called [my son] last night and he hung up on me, he was so upset. I could tell he was about to cry. I almost cried myself. I worry about my kids so much. I wake up at night worrying about them. You wouldn’t get it because you’re not a mom.”
During this whole conversation I was nodding sympathetically and listening. I hadn’t said a thing!
I didn’t even think of that! Imagine that I wasn’t childless by choice - how hurtful that would have been, if I wanted to be a mom and couldn’t, for whatever reason. :eek:
I haven’t spent thousands of dollars but quite a bit, certainly. I think I just had my first sign of perimenopause but I had the Essure treatment a few years ago…but yeah my fucking gold medal is coming up. 
Parents I get that you love your children more than your own lives. Good parents, anyway. Not all parents do, as commented earlier in the thread. I may not emotionally feel the same way as you do, and never could, but I have a pretty powerful imagination and I can get the idea!
I suspect she was feeling insecure because she fears her son is angry at her for putting a price tag on the dog’s life. She needed to reassure herself that she wasn’t a bad person even though her son might be angry with her. Unfortunately, you were the one within earshot so she put you down to reassure herself that she is still a good person.
It was kind of you to defuse rather than escalate. She sounds obnoxious but she is also genuinely in pain.
It’s hard to put a price tag on your doggie’s life but there is a limit to all of our largesse, no? And like I said, this price tag was in the thousands of dollars. I know when you get a pet you are liable for all of his expenses, and they will probably scrape together the money somehow, but it is a lot of money. I don’t even blame her for hesitating to just spend thousands of dollars, out of the blue, on even a beloved member of the family.
But yes, she probably just feared the son was mad at her. It’s a sad situation all around. Poor doggy.
From that conversation, It seems to me like she thought you’d think it was weird to wake up at night worrying about her kids, and she wanted to clear things up in advance.