Mild rant. I don't want kids, but now im at that age where all my stepsisters, sister and close friend all have kids now. My last childless stepsister is pregnant and they want to facetime the gender reveal. I just can't feign my excitement for this shit anymore. oh yay, another white american baby, how special. I guess she really just made the mistake of having a kid after the people i care about most(sister and close friend) already had kids so i just don't care anymore(in addition to not being close with my stepsisters, our parents married and we were all young adults basically).
But this got me thinking about how people talk about their pregnancies. The selfless reason is bringing a life into the world(lol) but i literally can't think of another selfless reason. They will want the kid to be like them, they will try to raise it like them, they probably also are thinking about how a child can care for them when they are older. Two people think they are really great and made something super special and im fucking over it.
Ideally, I'd like the child to eventually consider me so reactionary as to deserve execution and have the wherewithal to follow through.
Also, this framing presupposes that the only configuration a child can exist in is a nuclear family, an incredibly modern and harmful arrangement that reproduces generational trauma with staggering regularity. The precondition for the existence of a child is genetic material from two people, but that doesn't just magic up some kind of ownership of this new person by the people with the source DNA. Amerikkkan insistence on this structure and all its consequences is one of the big reasons we all have huge parental baggage and anxiety disorders, now. There are better ways, but most prospective parents either don't know about them or they can't conceive of an upbringing different from theirs so it wouldn't even occur to them.