this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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me_irl
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I have friends who didn't have kids and all of them either end up "adopting" friends who were young and needed a mentor or doing something more meaningful with their lives. One became a professor and is a mentor for kids and the other one became a local radio host that helps people through their emotions.
I honestly didn't know what I was missing until I had my son. To each their own.
And that's really the point, you don't add meaning to your life because you have a kid. You add meaning to your life by helping others. Some people do that with their kids while my husband and I choose to do that with friends and family. I'm happy with being child free and I'm happy for those people who find meaning in raising their kids. It's not an either/or situation.
I will preface by saying that having kids is hard, and today more than ever, it is not necessary to have kids.
But mentoring and bonding with someone else's kid is not the same thing as having your own kid, by a mile. I've done both, and having your own kid is a unique feeling.
The nice thing though is that if you don't have kids, you don't know what it's like. So you don't miss anything because you've never had that feeling.
So when you hear people like me that it's the best feeling in the world, you don't have that experience. So for you, it's not true.
I needed to read this, thank you!! Been healing from some related fallout with my birth family, and figuring out what that means for me and my life going forward. I now recognize the damage one can potentially do by finding their life's meaning through their kids. Not only does it make the child emotionally responsible for the parent, it also leads to inevitable blowout when expectations aren't met.
I have no desire to repeat that damage and can't conceive anyway so kids no longer factor into my life. It's opened a number of other wonderful and fulfilling opportunities, but the FOMO and fear of isolation when I get older definitely gets to me sometimes. I'm the youngest person I know by a lot... gonna need to fix that in the next 40 years or so or life's going to get real depressing. I want to, in some small way, help build the world that comes after me, and rescinding parenthood means figuring out what the hell that even means now, and that's terrifying. Maybe I'll teach someday, or something.
People will come and go throughout your life and I completely understand that is a really scary concept for most folks. Blood family connections are mostly a given in life (whether you want them or not) but all other connections are something you have to consciously work at. You just have to keep an open mind and look for opportunities to form those connections with others. Maybe you'll become a mentor for some else going through a similar life situation. Maybe you'll get "adopted" by an elder who has love to give. And maybe you'll become an auntie/uncle to nibblings (blood relatives or adopted). None of these roles will give you the real experience of parenthood and that's ok because every role is valid and there is no guarantee in life that says we get to experience them all. You'll find that the roles you come to fill and work on are the ones you really need in the end.
That's so well said. I think a lot of people don't even realize how much we need other people to be happy with ourselves, by ourselves. We need connection and some voluntary dependence to be able to see and understand ourselves. Having a kid is one way but it is not the only way to realize this or to achieve this. It is probably the most straightforward one that just "happens" to a lot of people passively. To find meaning in helping other people that are not your family one has to actively seek this out. And maybe there is even something about having to actively seek this versus having this happen to you.