I think you misread that Ben. The first pregnancy was not an accident. She says, It was a choice. The first time and the second time.At some point, we decided that I’d go off the pill and see what happened.
Thank you for saying it before I did. I am a father to a nine-week-old boy. My wife and I went through the exact same stuff as this writer. I feel better knowing this is, if not normal, at least a pattern. I did not want to bring a child into the world until I felt I would not resent the time I would lose. I traveled as much as I could, I tried lots of different relationships, I had different careers and lives. So did my wife. We met in our thirties. We already had fully-formed personalities and lives. She had just gotten her PhD when I met her. We were married before the two-year anniversary of our first date. My son was born nine days after I turned 40. You change. That's not just okay -- that's GOOD. I'm still a panty waist liberal. I still want to punch greedy people. I do miss getting the free time I had. Then again I'm already getting slightly more time than I did the first month. Soon enough that baby will have his own personality. I have no resentments. Also, I went to Belgium twice -- and I'll be back. We don't live in the world that our parents had. Mine couldn't afford to send me to a public university (in the early 90s) whereas they each went to private colleges in the 1960s. I would hear my mother's demands, then look at her as if she were crazy... ...because it's not like she was holding the purse strings. People that pay for you can tell you what to do. I resent that the Reagan Revolution left us without funded social resources, but I don't mind that this means they can't tell me how to create my own communities. Having a child has been the next step in my exploration of the world. Now you'll have to excuse me, as the wife needs a nap and the baby can sleep on me.
Pardon me. The dangers of speed reading I guess. But it still doesn't say what changed her mind. If you stop using birth control and continue to have unprotected sex, you're going to get pregnant. Discontinuing contraceptives is the functional equivalent of choosing to have kids.
maybe you sped passed this paragraph.
Looking back, the fact that my faith needed shoring up was a sign that something was changing. As I got older, the constant travel that once thrilled me became wearying. My work still meant a lot to me, but while I once thought that publishing a book would make me feel that I’d arrived, publishing two taught me that arrival is elusive. Where I’d once seen family and intellectual life in opposition, over time I started worrying that it was an intellectual loss to go through life without experiencing something so fundamental to so many people’s existence. Meanwhile, 35 was creeping up on me. I’d been led to believe, falsely, that this is when most women’s fertility collapses. I still wasn’t sure that I’d be a good mother, but I had no doubt that my immensely kind husband would be a good father, probably good enough to make up for me
That's retrospective though. It doesn't sound like that's how she was feeling at the time, it sounds like that's how she THOUGHT she felt at the time, and we all know how bad humans are with the whole 'accurate recollection' thing. This is really the crux of the argument for me. What things were they discussing that made them ambivalent, and what factor(s) specifically at the time made them choose to have kids? It just all strikes me haphazard, as most conceptions seem to be. Have a baby, and the choice is made for you and then it's up to the writer in this case to justify it after the fact. I'm not writing this as a critique of parents as a whole, but of a person in specific. Imagine that instead of being able to continue to jet-set around to various exotic locations with a 6 month old, she had suffered intense postpartum depression, or else suffered the things her earlier negative examples had gone through. This article would have been a very different one.Matt and I went back and forth, and back and forth some more. We both felt like we were atop a fulcrum and could be pushed either way if only the other knew what to do. At some point, we decided that I’d go off the pill and see what happened.
“through no act of his own, but because of a careless, inconceivably frivolous and selfish act of mine, making life untenable.”
A 40-year-old mother of twins wrote, “I was an attractive, fulfilled career woman before I had these kids. Now I’m an exhausted, nervous wreck who misses her job and sees very little of her husband. He’s got a ‘friend,’ I’m sure, and I don’t blame him.”