Reply to I regret having kids

Forum Index » General Parenting Discussion

Reply to "I regret having kids"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can I ask how it took until after number two was born (when the first one would have already been seven) for you to come to this realisation? Was it the stress of going from one to two kids? [/quote]

OP. It’s complicated. The severity of #1s special needs came to light when I was already a few months pregnant with #2. And raising #1 just gets harder with as they get older. The hardships forced me to come to terms with truths that were not in my awareness. Also think I’m just becoming more introspective with age (I’m 48).[/quote]

I get it — it’s complicated. My oldest has profound special needs, which we also didn’t have a sense of until #2 was about a year old. The reality is that my oldest has an incredibly limited quality of life. I’m not sure we did her any favors by bringing her into this world (note, we did not have an in utero diagnosis). I don’t want her to outlive me, because she requires 24/7 care and the likelihood of her being abused is incredibly high. Do I “regret” having her? Yes, in some sense, maybe I do. I also love her a lot.

We haven’t slept through the night in almost 14 years. I’m sure the level of sleep deprivation we have has taken 5-10 years off our own life expectancy. Am I exhausted from changing diapers, making sippy cups, etc endlessly — yep. Do I hate it? Sure, I do.

But that said, I think therapy might help you. My husband and I have just sort of chosen to live in happiness. We laugh, have fun, outsource a bunch of her care (which is realize isn’t possible for most) and just keep moving forward with as much positivity as possible. We don’t dwell on the miserable parts, but we joke around about them. We have done a few sessions of counseling together and then I’ve done some on my own. It helps.[/quote]

You sound like my neighbors who seem to have an amazing marriage/life perspective with a child with profound special needs in need of lifelong care. My marriage is fine, but I’m truly not sure if it is strong enough to survive that sort of strain. Much smaller things create a lot of tension in our home. [/quote]

Same poster. My husband and I joke that we are really, really good at the hard stuff, but the little things are where we annoy the crap out of each other pretty much every day. We definitely are not living some perfect life. I will say that (i) money for outsourcing helps and (ii) we are lucky that neither of us was prone to anxiety/depression. Those two things are what ultimately allow us to focus on the good of it all. But if you are the OP, I will say that therapy helps. My husband and I went together twice. We just weren’t being out best selves and our therapist helped us come up with some really basic solutions. In our case, I think extreme sleep deprivation was part of our problem. It is hard to be patient and kind when you are utterly exhausted.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics