In which I mumble about scary stuff...

[dormant_dragon]

Motherhood, to be precise.

Wondering what kind of parent I would make, were I to take the dramatic side-step in my outlook required for me to consider having children.

Read an article in a random magazine at lunch today. The article was entitled 'I love my husband more than my kids!' and was written by a woman who makes this claim perfectly unashamedly.

Now, I wasn't particularly aware that this was something one ought to be ashamed of in the first place. Reading on, I found that every other new mother in this woman's social group claimed to have 'fallen in love' with her child, and also to have lost interest in sex, to the point of not even wanting to engage in canoodling with her partner. Not the writer of the article, however - she remained completely besotted with her man, regardless of the sleepless nights, the nappy-changing, the breast-feeding, the stretch-marks, the whole shebang. And he felt the same.

I WANT TO BE LIKE THAT.

And I'm quite convinced that I will be. For one thing, I don't buy into the idea of 'falling in love' with one's new baby. In fact it strikes me as being distinctly creepy to put it like that. Somehow, there seems to be a deeply-ingrained collective idea in western society that being a good mother involves developing a martyr complex, and putting the children before everything else in the world, even one's partner. As if amorous love and maternal love cannot coexist in the same heart - or at least, should not.

Well bollocks to that, I say - loving someone enough to have a family with them means, or should mean, loving them for life, deeply and immovably. Sure you love the kids, but that is a different kind of love, that fulfils a different purpose in one's life. So it isn't a question of loving one's partner MORE than one's children, it is simply love in a different context. Ultimately, it is the love shared between the parents that holds a family together. If that is somehow diminished by actually having the family, what is the point?

Comments

[japester.livejournal.com]

I'm glad we feel alike :)
I see loving children in a very similar boat to loving parents. You do it because of the biology, not out of choice. This is a different kind of love from that you share with your chosen partner.

[sagebee.livejournal.com]

I like the hypothetical question that someone's father-in-law put to us once ... if your children and partner were trapped in a car with a fire sweeping towards them, who would you rescue first if you could only rescue once? Of course everybody jumps at "what about the children" (more life to live/innocent lives/ couldn't live with oneself afterwards etc etc) but the true answer, if there is such a thing, is your partner.
Of course, the love you feel for your partner and the love you feel for your children is vastly different and saying "I love my husband more than I love my kids" is a bit weird. "Falling in love" with your child? Sounds a bit new age/romantic to me. I think it is an interesting anthropological example of cuteness tweaking our intrinsic protective instincts to care for the defenseless animal.

[etfb.livejournal.com]

That hypothetical is easy: I would do what James T Kirk did on the Kobayashi Maru (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru): change the rules. Gods only know how, but I would.

Hello, Dragon! I think you'd make an excellent mother, and no, you don't have to choose who to love. The idea that human beings can only love one person at a time is just plain dumb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyamory), and it is quite all right for you to be "in love" with your baby. I'm certainly in love with mine, and I'm not even a mother! And I'm also in love with my Elder Daughter of DOOOOM, despite not being genetically related to her at all, and I will always be in love with my wife. This is how it works, and there's nothin' wrong with it.

[jadeisms.livejournal.com]

Coming from a new mother... I love my daughter but I lurv Dazz. I may not always have the energy for sex but more now than ever do I appreciate the soft touch, a kiss or a hug. When he holds our daughter I am just bursting with joy.
As for falling in love with ones baby I wouldn't say that is quiet right but it isn't wrong. You don't have an instant bond. But one day when feeding Lauren just looked up whilst suckling, placed her hand on my boob and just kind of smiled. Then I knew I loved her.

[meljane.livejournal.com]

They had a whole show on Oprah dedicated to either that article or one similiar to it and they had the writer of the article on tv as well and alot of women didn't agree with the lady and it was kind of sad that some of the women were just in the mother role and had not wanted to be intimate with there partner any more cos it was either too hard for them or somehow felt wrong for them .

I agree with the whole thing of having a different kind of love for a baby/child than you would for your husband or partner .

I know I definetly feel differently to my husband than I do to my parents as well .

Motherhood scares the hell out of me as well for many reasons and one main reason is because of what my parents were like when I was growing up and I'm always afraid if I had kids that I would be like them .

[alamark.livejournal.com]

I think part of that line of thinking ties in with the "blood is thicker than water" argument, which I believe is often overused.

If blood family was absolutely the be-all and end-all of relationships, we would only ever be hooking up with our blood relatives, but we don't, do we?

I find it disturbing to see women who place their relationship with their children on a pedestal, while their relationship with their partner falls by the wayside like a discarded toy. Their bond with their partner slowly corrodes away to nothing but a series of daily routines while "The Kids" get all their time and energy.

Eventually, their kids will start their own lives anew and those women will awaken in the cold ruins of their formerly happy home, next to someone they don't know any more. And perhaps they'll realise they squandered away their time with the person they were supposed to be devoted to "'til death do us part." Some even try to place the blame on their partner, or their kids, or anyone except themselves. Others realise they only have themselves to blame.

BUT, to be fair, until quite recently, it was expected by many sectors of society that women would automatically behave this way and it is hard to break the chains of social conditioning, particularly in such a short space of time.

I believe, that if we are aware of these sorts of traps, we're halfway there to defeating them or avoiding falling into them altogether.