Mom's Resent Dad's

A new article on the Time website, looks at the idea that mom's resent dad's for the amount dad's do when it comes to child rearing.  The article can be found here.

The article states that according to a sample of 1200 mothers "92% of working moms and 89% of their stay-at-home (SAHM) sisters report feeling overwhelmed by the demands of work, maintaining a household and parenting, prompting more than 60% to say they feel like they're piloting the parenting plane solo."

Fascinatingly, it didn't seem to matter if the mother's worked full time, part time, or were stay at home parents.  "Of the 1,259 women surveyed, 91% were married and 9% had a significant other with whom they lived. Working moms accounted for 68% of the respondants (54% worked full-time); the remaining 32% identified themselves as SAHMs."  They all felt they did more work and felt resentful.

Now, I know I may get strung up for this, but really?!  I have a lot of sympathy for the 54% of mom's who work full time.  They are basically working two jobs while their partner works only one, or maybe one and a half.  But I really don't feel all that bad for the 32% of SAHMs.  Taking care of the house and children is their job.  It's a worthy job, and should be treated as labor the same as a job that brings in income, but to expect a spouse to work all day and then come home and do half the things involved in caring for a house and children is absurd when one partner stays home.

I'm so glad my husband and I split the household chores, but then we both work full time so it's really only fair.  If he stayed home all day, damn straight I'd expect to come home to a clean house and dinner.

Ah, Wedding Season!

It's that time of year again, wedding season.  I hate wedding season.  Not because I don't enjoy watching my friends and family exchange vows of love (I actually quite enjoy that bit) but because it's always a sad reminder of how pathetically greedy people are. 

My biggest pet peeve with regards to weddings is registries.  Not having them, but advertising them.  The happy couple simply cannot wait to tell anyone who will listen exactly what they deem appropriate for a gift.  What's the easiest way to do that?  Put the information right there in the invitation!  This is just so tacky and rude, I can't believe people can look at themselves in the mirror afterwards without cringing at their own greedy reflection.  You invite people to weddings, not the gifts you hope to extract from them as payment. 

CNN recently posted an article about registering for honeymoons.  You can read it here.  Basically it's about couples that "already have everything" (Oh, life is hard for some people!) and so they want their guests to pay for their honeymoon instead.  I love that the couples used as examples in this article are those on their second or third marriage.  Subsequent marriages don't require gifts at all, particularly if you attended a previous marriage.  So asking for them seems a little optimistic. 

Now, ultimately, I don't really even have a problem with the honeymoon registry idea.  But for goodness sake, don't go around telling people.  Should people ask, then mention you have a registry.  It's the same as a child having a birthday party.  It's okay to tell your aunt that you'd really like a video game when she says, "What would like for your birthday?"  But it's not okay to march up to poor Aunt May and say, "Seeing as you're coming to my party, I want Super Mario Wii!"

You're suppose to be an adult when you get married.  At least try to act like one with a little dignity and class.

"The Plan"

by Te55♥

My husband and I often joke about how everyone we know is following The Plan.  This is nothing more than the course of life that many people choose to follow.  It goes like this:

1. Graduate high school
2. Get some sort of post secondary
3. Meet someone
4. Get married
5. Buy a house
6. Have children
7. Spend your life working, accumulating possessions, go on predicable vacations, rack up debt, work to pay off debt, upgrade the car and house, pressure your now grown children for grandchildren...
8. Grow old and die

You can quibble with #7 if you like, about how meaningful life is because of step #6, but this is the general path of life many people follow.  And it's just not for us. 

Whenever we face something challenging and difficult, such as hauling ourselves to another hemisphere or volunteering in a developing nation, this is often what we come back to.  We are making a conscious choice not to follow The Plan. 

I should be clear that I don't think less of people who chose to follow The Plan, so long as this is what genuinely makes them happy.  Where my problem lies is with people who follow it out of lack of anything better to do, or out of inertia, or because it's what their parents did.  In the same way people look at me in confusion with regards to not wanting children, I look right back at them thinking, "But don't you want anything more out of life?!"

My goals for this life are actually pretty simple.  I want to see the world.  All of it.  And I want to leave the planet a little bit better for my having been here.  I'm consuming a lot of resources by my very existence, and I want to be worthy of them.  I don't need my name published in history books, just to know that in the balance, I did more good than harm.  For me, that doesn't mean following The Plan.

Should the Dead Have Children?

Time posted an article titles "Should Men Be Allowed to Father Children After They're Dead?"  In the article the issue of using frozen sperm posthumously to conceive children is looked at.

"In Australia, a woman was granted permission last month to use her dead husband's sperm in an in-vitro fertilization (IVF) attempt to create a child. In Israel, grieving grandparents are petitioning a court to allow them to use their dead son's sperm to conceive a grandchild. And in California, a woman is due in three months with her husband's child — even though her husband died not long before she got pregnant."

This children at any cost, using them to recover from the grief of losing a loved one, disturbs me.  Children are not replacements, and they shouldn't be brought into the world because a wife or parents are desperate to hold on to some part of the person they lost. 

I have been through several heart shattering deaths in my life, and understand the desire for having something, anything, of the person who is now gone still be a part of my everyday world.  But children should be brought into the world because they are wanted, not because they are a fragile link to a deceased partner or child.  

The God Argument

One of the most insidious arguments I've heard about why it is my duty to procreate is that "God says."  (Okay, there's usually more to it than that, but that's what it boils down to.)  How do you argue with that?  In one way, it's very easy: I don't believe in God.  But ultimately, this can just lead to more horror on the part of the religious nutcase, and is sometimes a place I just don't want to go.  Alternatively, the person walks away shaking their head with pity in their eyes, because you are clearly not only broken you're also going to hell.  Maybe it's better you aren't condemning your children, too.  This is a really unsatisfying end to the conversation!  There is absolutely no middle ground that can be reached between me and the religious individual.  You both leave the conversation feeling the other person is totally wrong and a bit of a nutter, to boot.  There's nothing to be done about it, it's just irritating.