Which would you rather clutch?
Posted on 02/25/2006 9:34:52 AM PST by Khankrumthebulgar
by KATE MULVEY, Daily Mail 08:54am 24th February 2006
As I lay on the bathroom floor, clutching my stomach, the tears rolling down my cheeks like torrents, all I could feel was a gaping, infinite sense of loss. Yet I was not at some funeral of a loved one, I was at a child's fourth birthday party, and I was the only woman there without a baby.
Are you childless and is it right for you? Tell us in our reader comments below
I never planned on being 39 and childless but somehow, here I was, a few months shy of my 40th birthday and all I was clutching was a Prada handbag.
Back at the party, the yummy mummies were settled around the kitchen table as they casually fed their toddlers pizza and wiped up baby sick from their newborns. Amid the mayhem I was shouting into my mobile and organising my glamorous Saturday night ahead.
I laughed and joked about how I would be wearing fluorescent pink hot pants at a party, but it was empty laughter.
My nephew came over and sat on my knee. He flung his arms around my neck and clung to me. I could smell that unique baby smell and marvelled at the sensations in my body as I held him close.
Yet I knew that I would have to hand this little bundle back and then all I would feel would be the aching loss for the children I will never have.
Grief and loss. These are two emotions that have become commonplace in my emotional repertoire of late. It can be frightening to yearn for a child, and it is hard to fathom the desperate urgency that comes with thinking that maybe, one day, I could be a mother.
But after that party, I had an epiphany. In six months' time I will be 40, and after a great deal of soul searching, I have decided that I am bowing out gracefully from the baby race. I cried myself to sleep for weeks. No child. Not now. Not ever.
People look at someone like me - a woman who is still attractive, has her own career and doesn't have children - and think that either I am an unfeeling monster or a tragic failure. Sometimes they say it to my face.
Just last week, a well-meaning friend stood triumphant with her twoyearold on her hip and told me: "Well, Kate, you don't like children do you?"
I lost my rag. I made it clear that I hadn't made a choice not to have children. I am not one of those women who sat down at 30 and categorically factored out babies from their life plan. I love children and share all the motherly instincts of most women.
But it is a painful modern truth that there is a growing number of women - the proportion of women under 50 without children has doubled over the past two decades - who have simply forgotten to have a baby.
Somehow, amid the schmoozing and the broadening of the mind, the baby question has always been put on the back burner.
And then suddenly - at exactly the point when infertility cannot be ignored - I, like other childless women, realise it is probably too late.
What went wrong? How is it that the age-old business of having babies has suddenly become fraught with so many difficulties.
An important clue can be found back in the late 1970s when I was in my teens. I was part of the generation of schoolgirls who, instead of being propelled towards childbirth by cultural and religious expectations, could balance motherhood against a career and good times.
The result is that my childless contemporaries and I are the fallout generation from the sexual revolution, the real-life Bridget Jones's who spend their evenings getting drunk instead of reading bedtime stories.
We were told we could have it all, but in reality we were sold a pipe dream. The reality is that we forgot that we are helpless in the face of our biological clocks. And now it is simply too late for a lot of us.
Back then it all seemed so different. We were being "freed from a life of drudgery" - or so the feminists ranted as they deconstructed the romantic ideal of marriage and motherhood. And along with the rest of the neo-dolly birds, I burnt my M&S bra in the name of freedom.
The very act of having and rearing children was seen as counterintuitive; boring and inconsequential at best, ruinous to any self-development at worst. My friends and I embraced the feminist ideology that was going to give us a life of glittering prizes.
At the time our narrow notion of self-development saw settling down as a sacrifice too hard to pay. We wanted the same chances to succeed as any man and we wanted the same choices that they had.
Flashback to my early 20s and I was living that promised life. I was at university in Kent, studying Italian, and life was a round of parties here and abroad. My dating diary was full of London's eligible bachelors and my friends were as footloose and fancyfree as I was.
There was a whole gang of us who used to hang around the Roebuck and other pubs in Knightsbridge, always ready for a party or a trip to the Embassy nightclub.
When a friend of mine got married - at the age of 25 - we pitied her, got trashed on vodka and were sick in her parents' bedroom. We were living the lives that only men had been allowed to live. We drank too much, smoked too much, ate badly and behaved even worse.
We were the modern women who didn't care less about oiling the wheels of the middle-class dinner party, much less about getting a mortgage and having 2.4 children.
I was living the glossy magazine lifestyle that was built around freedom and choice.
After university I worked in the fashion industry and then travelled in Europe, making the most of my fluent French and Italian while enjoying a life of parties, late nights and fun.
I had the freedom to drink wine into the small hours, instead of going to bed early ready for the school run; the freedom to book a holiday for one; and the freedom to spend my money on myself.
Then, when I was 33, my elder sister gave birth to her first child at the age of 38. When I went inside the delivery room and saw her husband burst into tears of joy, I realised in that instant what real happiness meant. It was a feeling I had never experienced.
So what did I do? Instead of working up to a reality shock about my own ticking body clock, all I remember thinking was how lucky I was that my gym-toned body wouldn't be ruined by stretch marks and sagging breasts.
In fact, even though I knew deep down that they had got their life choices right, part of me pitied my sister and the other new parents as they tried to come to terms with the shock of how having a baby had changed their lives. After all, weren't their faces etched with weariness?
One day I went round to see a friend who was recently divorced after her husband left her shortly after she had given birth to their third child. She was a wreck and so unhappy that she took her bad mood out on her offspring.
That evening, as I watched her put her children to bed, I almost ran out of the house, heaving a sigh of relief as I went, reassuring myself how clever I was to have escaped such a terrible fate.
But now look at me - and look at her. She has three lovely teenagers, who are all at top London schools and who all give a powerful meaning to her life. All I have are the empty hours to fill at the weekend.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not blaming anyone else and I certainly don't expect any sympathy. I realise now that you get out of life what you put into it.
Besides, there have been so many times when I could have jumped on the baby wagon myself.
When I was 35 and living in Geneva with my Swiss boyfriend, he broached the subject of children. He had a well-paid job while I was a freelance writer and had the time to have a baby.
It should have been perfect. But all I could see was years of mundane drudgery looming ahead and boring children who I would never be able to "switch off". So I left and went back to London, to a pokey flat in Earl's Court.
Two years later, I published my second book. I was 37 and friends were beginning to view me as a bit of a shallow hedonist. Suddenly, I wasn't a glamorous singleton any more; I was just a bit sad.
They were too preoccupied with taking their toddlers to ballet classes to live vicariously through my romantic adventures. The truth was, I was slowly becoming a sad non-person in the world of child rearing and it was painful.
I made more of an effort but, as I accompanied them and their children to the park on a Saturday afternoon and shivered in the cold, I felt like a failure.
I had no little nose to wipe, no tears to dry or words of tenderness when they fell down. All I had was a hair appointment.
Looking back, I think I was suffering from delayed maturity syndrome. I was so used to acting like I was 27 that I had convinced myself I was in the prime of my life.
The trouble is no matter how much botox we inject into our faces or how many miles we run on the treadmill, we cannot change our biological reality.
Delayed maturity means that many women out there waste their narrow window of fertility. Right up until last year I was in denial, telling people that I was a "free spirit" as if it were some kind of badge of honour.
Then last summer my little sister, who had hit 35, had her second boy and my desire to have a baby hit me like a lorry. I found it excruciatingly painful to be around my new nephew Oscar and stopped seeing both my sisters for over a year.
One of the few times I held Oscar - we were at a friend's christening - the physical craving to hold my own baby was unbearable.
The experience really shook me, and I was forced to recognise for the first time in my life that babies are a big deal and that I have missed out on something so fundamental to my happiness.
And recognising that fact is no comfort; the hole is simply too big. Even months later the emotions are so raw and close to the surface. The pain of wanting a child never goes away.
Whenever I am out my eyes are drawn to babies. I feel a terrible urge to pick them up and hold their tiny bodies. I sit and watch toddlers in playgrounds and listen to their peels of laughter ring in my ears and don't know whether I want to laugh or cry.
So why, when my life seems so bereft without children, have I given up on motherhood?
I have to say, I went through a period last year when my baby yearning was so intense that I said to myself that if I didn't have a man by the time I was 40, I would either ask an obliging male friend or find a sperm donor.
Now I realise that, for me, marriage and children are a package.
I am single. Even if I met Prince Charming tomorrow, we would still have to date, marry and then have the children. I would be a wrinkly 44-year-old before I even had the epidural.
As desperate as I am for a child, single motherhood is also not an option. I have seen friends go through it and it is brutally hard. The loneliness of raising a child alone is too much.
Besides, being a firsttime mother in her fourth decade does not come with much dignity. Who wants to be the oldest mother at the school gates?
Having a child after 40 is a bit like saying you want to run a marathon at 65 and the odds are stacked highly against you. For a start, 50 per cent of pregnancies in women over the age of 40 end in miscarriage.
I am not pretending that the awful truth has not gone away. I live with my decision every day.
But a baby is not a prize that you have to win at all costs. And I think the costs are too high for the baby to pay when the mother is over 40.
The last thing I want is to carry on working and raise a latch-key kid. A lot of my friends and acquaintances are rearing an army of neglected middle-class children.
They are women who, in order to maintain the lifestyles they want, keep going out to work, leaving their children to pay the price as they need to be cared for outside the family. Even Madonna and Cherie Blair, with all their money and helpers, are busy career women, snatching quality time with their children.
On the plus side, now that I have finally put the baby question to rest, I am finding that there are benefits to having a life free of offspring.
There is the freedom to do what you want and to pursue the career that you want. I am also newly in demand with older, divorced alpha-males.
Having done the family and success thing, they are not interested in having another family and find a younger woman unhindered by her own children an attractive companion.
The emotional progression I have been through in deciding not to have children is just like going through a bereavement.
As a friend who lost her mother ten years ago put it, the pain is still raw, but it just becomes a part of your life and you learn to deal with it. It is when an emotion is fresh that it's scary.
So, for me, I am slowly discovering that while the suffering will not go away, there is a way to live with the wounds.
As I lay on the bathroom floor, clutching my stomach, the tears rolling down my cheeks like torrents, all I could feel was a gaping, infinite sense of loss. Yet I was not at some funeral of a loved one, I was at a child's fourth birthday party, and I was the only woman there without a baby.
Are you childless and is it right for you? Tell us in our reader comments below
I never planned on being 39 and childless but somehow, here I was, a few months shy of my 40th birthday and all I was clutching was a Prada handbag.
Back at the party, the yummy mummies were settled around the kitchen table as they casually fed their toddlers pizza and wiped up baby sick from their newborns. Amid the mayhem I was shouting into my mobile and organising my glamorous Saturday night ahead.
I laughed and joked about how I would be wearing fluorescent pink hot pants at a party, but it was empty laughter.
My nephew came over and sat on my knee. He flung his arms around my neck and clung to me. I could smell that unique baby smell and marvelled at the sensations in my body as I held him close.
Yet I knew that I would have to hand this little bundle back and then all I would feel would be the aching loss for the children I will never have.
Grief and loss. These are two emotions that have become commonplace in my emotional repertoire of late. It can be frightening to yearn for a child, and it is hard to fathom the desperate urgency that comes with thinking that maybe, one day, I could be a mother.
But after that party, I had an epiphany. In six months' time I will be 40, and after a great deal of soul searching, I have decided that I am bowing out gracefully from the baby race. I cried myself to sleep for weeks. No child. Not now. Not ever.
People look at someone like me - a woman who is still attractive, has her own career and doesn't have children - and think that either I am an unfeeling monster or a tragic failure. Sometimes they say it to my face.
Just last week, a well-meaning friend stood triumphant with her twoyearold on her hip and told me: "Well, Kate, you don't like children do you?"
I lost my rag. I made it clear that I hadn't made a choice not to have children. I am not one of those women who sat down at 30 and categorically factored out babies from their life plan. I love children and share all the motherly instincts of most women.
But it is a painful modern truth that there is a growing number of women - the proportion of women under 50 without children has doubled over the past two decades - who have simply forgotten to have a baby.
Somehow, amid the schmoozing and the broadening of the mind, the baby question has always been put on the back burner.
And then suddenly - at exactly the point when infertility cannot be ignored - I, like other childless women, realise it is probably too late.
What went wrong? How is it that the age-old business of having babies has suddenly become fraught with so many difficulties.
An important clue can be found back in the late 1970s when I was in my teens. I was part of the generation of schoolgirls who, instead of being propelled towards childbirth by cultural and religious expectations, could balance motherhood against a career and good times.
The result is that my childless contemporaries and I are the fallout generation from the sexual revolution, the real-life Bridget Jones's who spend their evenings getting drunk instead of reading bedtime stories.
We were told we could have it all, but in reality we were sold a pipe dream. The reality is that we forgot that we are helpless in the face of our biological clocks. And now it is simply too late for a lot of us.
Back then it all seemed so different. We were being "freed from a life of drudgery" - or so the feminists ranted as they deconstructed the romantic ideal of marriage and motherhood. And along with the rest of the neo-dolly birds, I burnt my M&S bra in the name of freedom.
The very act of having and rearing children was seen as counterintuitive; boring and inconsequential at best, ruinous to any self-development at worst. My friends and I embraced the feminist ideology that was going to give us a life of glittering prizes.
At the time our narrow notion of self-development saw settling down as a sacrifice too hard to pay. We wanted the same chances to succeed as any man and we wanted the same choices that they had.
Flashback to my early 20s and I was living that promised life. I was at university in Kent, studying Italian, and life was a round of parties here and abroad. My dating diary was full of London's eligible bachelors and my friends were as footloose and fancyfree as I was.
There was a whole gang of us who used to hang around the Roebuck and other pubs in Knightsbridge, always ready for a party or a trip to the Embassy nightclub.
When a friend of mine got married - at the age of 25 - we pitied her, got trashed on vodka and were sick in her parents' bedroom. We were living the lives that only men had been allowed to live. We drank too much, smoked too much, ate badly and behaved even worse.
We were the modern women who didn't care less about oiling the wheels of the middle-class dinner party, much less about getting a mortgage and having 2.4 children.
I was living the glossy magazine lifestyle that was built around freedom and choice.
After university I worked in the fashion industry and then travelled in Europe, making the most of my fluent French and Italian while enjoying a life of parties, late nights and fun.
I had the freedom to drink wine into the small hours, instead of going to bed early ready for the school run; the freedom to book a holiday for one; and the freedom to spend my money on myself.
Then, when I was 33, my elder sister gave birth to her first child at the age of 38. When I went inside the delivery room and saw her husband burst into tears of joy, I realised in that instant what real happiness meant. It was a feeling I had never experienced.
So what did I do? Instead of working up to a reality shock about my own ticking body clock, all I remember thinking was how lucky I was that my gym-toned body wouldn't be ruined by stretch marks and sagging breasts.
In fact, even though I knew deep down that they had got their life choices right, part of me pitied my sister and the other new parents as they tried to come to terms with the shock of how having a baby had changed their lives. After all, weren't their faces etched with weariness?
One day I went round to see a friend who was recently divorced after her husband left her shortly after she had given birth to their third child. She was a wreck and so unhappy that she took her bad mood out on her offspring.
That evening, as I watched her put her children to bed, I almost ran out of the house, heaving a sigh of relief as I went, reassuring myself how clever I was to have escaped such a terrible fate.
But now look at me - and look at her. She has three lovely teenagers, who are all at top London schools and who all give a powerful meaning to her life. All I have are the empty hours to fill at the weekend.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not blaming anyone else and I certainly don't expect any sympathy. I realise now that you get out of life what you put into it.
Besides, there have been so many times when I could have jumped on the baby wagon myself.
When I was 35 and living in Geneva with my Swiss boyfriend, he broached the subject of children. He had a well-paid job while I was a freelance writer and had the time to have a baby.
It should have been perfect. But all I could see was years of mundane drudgery looming ahead and boring children who I would never be able to "switch off". So I left and went back to London, to a pokey flat in Earl's Court.
Two years later, I published my second book. I was 37 and friends were beginning to view me as a bit of a shallow hedonist. Suddenly, I wasn't a glamorous singleton any more; I was just a bit sad.
They were too preoccupied with taking their toddlers to ballet classes to live vicariously through my romantic adventures. The truth was, I was slowly becoming a sad non-person in the world of child rearing and it was painful.
I made more of an effort but, as I accompanied them and their children to the park on a Saturday afternoon and shivered in the cold, I felt like a failure.
I had no little nose to wipe, no tears to dry or words of tenderness when they fell down. All I had was a hair appointment.
Looking back, I think I was suffering from delayed maturity syndrome. I was so used to acting like I was 27 that I had convinced myself I was in the prime of my life.
The trouble is no matter how much botox we inject into our faces or how many miles we run on the treadmill, we cannot change our biological reality.
Delayed maturity means that many women out there waste their narrow window of fertility. Right up until last year I was in denial, telling people that I was a "free spirit" as if it were some kind of badge of honour.
Then last summer my little sister, who had hit 35, had her second boy and my desire to have a baby hit me like a lorry. I found it excruciatingly painful to be around my new nephew Oscar and stopped seeing both my sisters for over a year.
One of the few times I held Oscar - we were at a friend's christening - the physical craving to hold my own baby was unbearable.
The experience really shook me, and I was forced to recognise for the first time in my life that babies are a big deal and that I have missed out on something so fundamental to my happiness.
And recognising that fact is no comfort; the hole is simply too big. Even months later the emotions are so raw and close to the surface. The pain of wanting a child never goes away.
Whenever I am out my eyes are drawn to babies. I feel a terrible urge to pick them up and hold their tiny bodies. I sit and watch toddlers in playgrounds and listen to their peels of laughter ring in my ears and don't know whether I want to laugh or cry.
So why, when my life seems so bereft without children, have I given up on motherhood?
I have to say, I went through a period last year when my baby yearning was so intense that I said to myself that if I didn't have a man by the time I was 40, I would either ask an obliging male friend or find a sperm donor.
Now I realise that, for me, marriage and children are a package.
I am single. Even if I met Prince Charming tomorrow, we would still have to date, marry and then have the children. I would be a wrinkly 44-year-old before I even had the epidural.
As desperate as I am for a child, single motherhood is also not an option. I have seen friends go through it and it is brutally hard. The loneliness of raising a child alone is too much.
Besides, being a firsttime mother in her fourth decade does not come with much dignity. Who wants to be the oldest mother at the school gates?
Having a child after 40 is a bit like saying you want to run a marathon at 65 and the odds are stacked highly against you. For a start, 50 per cent of pregnancies in women over the age of 40 end in miscarriage.
I am not pretending that the awful truth has not gone away. I live with my decision every day.
But a baby is not a prize that you have to win at all costs. And I think the costs are too high for the baby to pay when the mother is over 40.
The last thing I want is to carry on working and raise a latch-key kid. A lot of my friends and acquaintances are rearing an army of neglected middle-class children.
They are women who, in order to maintain the lifestyles they want, keep going out to work, leaving their children to pay the price as they need to be cared for outside the family. Even Madonna and Cherie Blair, with all their money and helpers, are busy career women, snatching quality time with their children.
On the plus side, now that I have finally put the baby question to rest, I am finding that there are benefits to having a life free of offspring.
There is the freedom to do what you want and to pursue the career that you want. I am also newly in demand with older, divorced alpha-males.
Having done the family and success thing, they are not interested in having another family and find a younger woman unhindered by her own children an attractive companion.
The emotional progression I have been through in deciding not to have children is just like going through a bereavement.
As a friend who lost her mother ten years ago put it, the pain is still raw, but it just becomes a part of your life and you learn to deal with it. It is when an emotion is fresh that it's scary.
So, for me, I am slowly discovering that while the suffering will not go away, there is a way to live with the wounds.
she can adopt a child
You posted the story twice.
You posted the story twice.
Probably such a witch that she couldn't keep a man.
I like the way she has a high opinion of herself... but really, a 40 year old woman going to a party with pink hotpants?
That doesn't work for me.
Something ain't right with that shrew.
Talk about drama. Does anyone really believe this account? Maybe she was a bit bummed, but bawling in a bathroom floor because she was the only woman without a baby at the get-together?
Indeed, if she reacted this way, she just isn't that tough. Maybe motherhood isn't for her.
"friends were beginning to view me as a shallow hedonist." Her friends were right.
OK.
I can feel the pain. The angst is palpable.
At the risk of seeming totally insensitive, if you did not make the choice, dear Kate, who did?
My first clue was the five times she put "I" in the first couple of sentences.
IMHO, being a parent is like being married - to be effective you have to want to do that (be a parent or a spouse) more than anything else in your life.
If there are emotional conflicts, she (and her unborns) are better off as they are.
Geez, show a little heart! She made the choice, she acknowledges that. I saw this more as a morality tale to another generation not to buy the bill of goods that she had bought. Her points and her pain are valid expressions of her choices. And recognize that despite her years of hedonistic behavior, she saw that single motherhood was not a good choice for a woman or her child. That is more selfless than many.
She certainly doesn't inspire confidence in her account.
I was thinking she is probably clinically depressed and that has been interfering with her ability to "connect" with folks who could take care of her baby problem.
Yeah! I got the same message out of this. A bit of a morality tale, she didn't realise and no one told her how painful it would be. Those who follow her should at least know the cost.
See my post #13. I knew I would get slammed for not "showing heart".
They don't exist.
And the stupid airhead who sat next to her in junior high school and had six kids in ten years will be the mother of a nation in a thousand.
Life sucks when you forget to do what you were designed to do by your Creator.
#14
Bump!
Bump!
Some people just aren't cut out to take care of kids, and I think this is the case here. She should be thankful.
Memo to Kate:
Tough cheese, babe. Your choice to climb out of the gene pool.
No sympathy. None.
Kids aren;t for everyone, this is very true.
It is difficult for me to comprehend the utter shallowness of someone who would even make this sort of thing a factor in how they manage their lives.
Exactly. What narrow thinking for her to believe only a natural birth makes a family. I guess that's why she fell for the feminist myth as well.
I believe it. The death of a dream is very painful.
Exactly. She made a deliberate decision.
So did I; I knew when I was considerably younger than 30 that I did not want to be a mother. Older people would smile and say, "Oh, you'll change your mind when you meet the right man, dear."
I met the right man, and he's been the right man for 20+ years now, but he didn't want kids either. I've never regretted being childless; if I ever do, I won't snivel about it like this woman's doing.
What dream? Her 'dream' comes across as more of a bitter afterthought. Postponing something indefinitely until it escapes her. What kind of dream is that?
ping for later
I used to do some consulting for a Baby Bell telephone company.The mid-level management was full of women in their late 30's who had realized that their careers were a lot less fulfilling than having children.
I was young and single at the time and let me tell you... that place was dangerous to work at. I don't think I ever had so many women hit on me at the same time. And it wasn't because I am that great a looking guy (sad to say)...
"I am single. Even if I met Prince Charming tomorrow, we would still have to date, marry and then have the children. "
See that is her biggest problem right there. She can't even find a guy to marry her. Having kids is secondary to her primary problem. I know a number of women exactly like that and they all go through this same issue of getting old and not having a family. They either have a severe personality flaw or else they are looking for the perfect man (which simply doesn't exist).
If she wants to blame someone or something other than herself, blame FEMINISM.
Feminist lies created this phenomenon, and fill women's heads with the notion that motherhood is unimportant, beneath them and/or something they can do later, after a career. It's all nonsense that denigrates motherhood, but too many women bought into it without recognizing their latent maternal drives and instincts until it was too late.
And no, she didn't have Downs Syndrome or retarded or anything like that. She is VERY intelligent. Of course I was told to abort her because of the "odds" and of course the geneticist was convinced that she'[d be retarded because my husbands brother was AFTER he had a HIGH FEVER and many years ago. Nah, I though they were full of you know and told them as much - I have knowledge but WISDOM finally kicked in.
At her school, they wanted her to skip a grade but we didn't think she was ready for it emotionally. Perhaps later when she is more mature. I want her to have a happy childhood, play, have fun at her own pace. I don't want a phony miniature adult.
So, I'm older but wiser :)
I put my time is as a femi nazi and thankfully God woke me up! Thank you! Funny my grandmother who lived to nearly 101, just shy of that by six months, had her last PLANNED child at age 45. I suppose fertility runs longer in my family.
As I read this, THAT could easily have been me. I feel bad for this person. They woke up too late! What I USED to do was AVOID these situations. Still God was determined that I have a child and WAKE UP!
How God has blessed me despite my idiotic feminist views at the time. NOW, I truly am an adult. Feminism of this sort is for women who refuse to grow up. Oh, I'm also the dreaded housewife that stays home. Oh how I used to ridicule those "empty headed women who often looked disheveled and scatter brained. Blush, blush, I've had days like that too SHHHHHHH! My hardcore career colleagues have long since abandoned me - and you know what? I DON'T MISS THEM!!! I'm happier without them.
What's especially nice is that I don't have my fema nazi days figure but my husband still loves me. He later admitted that he was trying to STRAIGHTEN ME out and thought I'd make a dynamite mom. He's not catting around, playing games and we're still in love! We're older and wiser.
Many of us bought based on that sales pitch of "you CAN have it all". Sadly, many didn't realize until too late that having it all isn't all it's cracked up to be! Something has to suffer: the job, the husband, the kids or you. Maybe all of it suffers.
Glad I got smart early! Now, my kids are raised .... time for me to be indulgent!
And that's the definition of success, making the (dare I say it?) CHOICE that's right for you. :)
I agree. Too many people on this thread jumping at the bit to shove her self-discovered lesson in her face. I think she is a "victim" (note quotes here) of the feminist culture who found out too late that what they are selling is a bit of an empty dream. Women out there who think that tomorrow never comes should read this carefully and contemplate what they want their lives to be about and certainly in the context of longevity.
Poor kid.
And here, : http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1340014/posts?page=27#27 "At 49 I have seen the mating dance between the genders for a few decades.
Hummm... Which one is it?... : ) <<< me
Which would you rather clutch?
Didn't I just see something this past week about a 62 year old woman giving birth? Could be that there will be others older than she at the school gates.
The last time I saw that many eyes ("I"s) was on the assembly line in a Barbie Doll factory.
for later reading...
I don't think she has the vaguest idea what parenthood entails.
From that and the rest of the article, she does not have the emotional stability to be a wife and mother
I have three daughters, the oldest in college. I'm telling them that ideally they should be married by their early 20's, and be having kids by mid-late 20's.
If you wait too long, the good guys will mostly be taken, and dealing with young kids in your 40's takes a lot of energy that you just don't have any more
I wish to God that more of my contemporaries had heard this message when we were young. I have too many friends who pitied me when my kids were toddlers who now ache for what I have as they've (my friends) matured.
So, for every person on this board who says, "She made her bed. I have no sympathy," I say, "You aren't required to have sympathy. But leave it alone. If this article strikes a chord with just 10 young women and spares them the same fate, it was a worthy read."
As for you not "believing" that she felt pain about her decision to postpone children until it was too late: Well, she wouldn't have gone public with this story and tried to spare others the same consequences of her actions if she didn't honestly believe that she screwed up and deeply regretted it.
I once bawled (I'm talking heart-wrenching sobs) on the kitchen floor because my husband ate my macaroni and cheese. (In my defense, I was 9 months pregnant at the time and the baby was a week overdue. DH thought it was the funniest breakdown he'd ever witnessed.)
Once was too many.
If you go to the original article, you will see that, at her present age, she is definitely not "a looker." It would be hard for her to get a husband now. Sorry gal, your best days are way behind you.
The biggest problem people like her face is not being able to think for themselves.
This is not feminism's fault. This is a personal failing of many people, who can only "follow the crowd".
Unfortunately, there have always been a sizable contingent of people like this in every society.
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