dormant_dragon (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dormant_dragon) wrote2006-07-05 07:13 pm
dormant_dragon) wrote2006-07-05 07:13 pm
In which I mumble about scary stuff...
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?
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?
no subject
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.
no subject
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.