Wife regretting not having kids

[Woggle]

We got to talking today and my wife was saying that even though deep down she knows that parenthood is not for us because we travel a lot she still wishes sometimes that she was a mother. She has a very close relationship with her college age niece and she said she sometimes wishes she said a child of her own to show that love to as well but also said that it's easy to be maternal when they go home at the end of the day. Is this just her expressing the what ifs that a lot of people have about any path in life?

[preraph]

It doesn't sound too serious. She realizes she's got limitations and would not want to do it all the time. I guess if the feeling intensify she'll let you know.

[DKT3]

I dont know. I've told the story about a childhood friend who never wanted children until she was 42-43, at which point she became desperate. Now at 46-47 she has two under the age of 4. 

Another thing I saw from a couple I knew was the husband never wanted kids, the wife agreed but 15 or so years into the marriage walked out on him because she decided she wanted to be a mother.  She said at the time she really believed she never wanted kids. Like your wife she voiced regrets and I guess he didn't respond.  She went a few more years and once she felt she was running out of time she walked. 

I guess the point I'm horribly getting at is, once the window is closing that decision becomes more difficult to accept.  Maybe ultimately she will decide its something she doesn't want...is she still child bearing age? If so, what if she decides to have one? Would you be open?

[CAPSLOCK BANDIT]

When a woman has a child, her brain actually changes... Experts are just beginning to map out how radical these changes actually are, but it seems that some change more than others. With this being said, certain women have a strong maternal instinct; we live in a society where, if a woman has to ask, she feels inconvenienced, for the most part... I mean, you know your wife better than I do, so can she reason her way through this? 

I will say this... Nature Vs. Man, Nature will win almost every time. Having kids is natural.

Another point of contention is social status: women who are mothers innately have a higher social status than women who do not. When women pass into a certain age group, their social status diminishes... It is what it is... But children provide a padding on this diminished status. People are social creatures; most women who are surrounded by mothers, will become mothers themselves... In the same way, most men who are surrounded by criminals, will become criminals themselves. Although, women are much more attuned to their social status and know how to use it, where as men, we are befuddled by a lot of these things.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/pregnancy-causes-lasting-changes-in-a-womans-brain/

[alphamale]

of the women I dated who did not have kids most of them wanted kids.  the women that already had kids made their kids #1 priority

[daisy1333]

She might just be expressing the what could have been. I have never wanted kids. I have know since I was 16. I had a tubal last year and for a second I was hit with a what could have been if I did have a kid. 
 
then I remembered all the reasons why I didn’t want kids and it quickly passed: 

 

talk to her and see where she’s at. Would you be open to having a kid if she wanted one? 

[Kitty Tantrum]

"Parenthood is not for us because we travel a lot" might sound reasonable on paper, but most women's biology/hormones/emotions will not simply fall in line with that sentiment because the words are spoken. Was you wife on the no-kids bandwagon before you met and hitched up? Or was this more your idea, or a stipulation of your lifestyle?

No, motherhood (parenthood) isn't like other "paths in life." The drive to reproduce is part of our biological makeup. There are exceptions, of course - women who legitimately feel no pull toward motherhood whatsoever - but most women who do not have children will eventually have to more or less go through a process of grieving.

It could be a simple "what if," or it could be a marriage-breaker. Hard to say at this point.

[daisy1333]

9 minutes ago, Kitty Tantrum said:

"Parenthood is not for us because we travel a lot" might sound reasonable on paper, but most women's biology/hormones/emotions will not simply fall in line with that sentiment because the words are spoken. Was you wife on the no-kids bandwagon before you met and hitched up? Or was this more your idea, or a stipulation of your lifestyle?

No, motherhood (parenthood) isn't like other "paths in life." The drive to reproduce is part of our biological makeup. There are exceptions, of course - women who legitimately feel no pull toward motherhood whatsoever - but most women who do not have children will eventually have to more or less go through a process of grieving.

It could be a simple "what if," or it could be a marriage-breaker. Hard to say at this point.

I agree with most of what you said, but it is not that abnormal for more and more women to not want kids. The older I get the more child free women I meet and none of them regret it.I think it sounds like a what if , but I could be wrong. 

[alphamale]

6 hours ago, daisy1333 said:

The older I get the more child free women I meet and none of them regret it.I think it sounds like a what if , but I could be wrong. 

almost all of them wish that they had had children.  they probably won't admit to it though

Edited January 14, 2020 by a LoveShack.org Moderator

[daisy1333]

6 hours ago, alphamale said:

 almost all of them wish that they had had children.  they probably won't admit to it though

Not at all. I’m child free and Will never have to worry about that bs again. I’ve never had the desire for that kind of life and at least 50% of the women I know say they never want kids: now I do suspect some of my younger coworkers will change their Mind , but at a certain age it’s safe to say a women doesn’t want kids. 
 

not all women have the desire for that 

Edited January 14, 2020 by a LoveShack.org Moderator

[Kitty Tantrum]

I never said that all women want children, I said MOST. This remains true in spite of any upward trends in elective childlessness. So you're not really disagreeing with me so much as putting words in my mouth. Please don't, thanks.

OP's wife has expressed apparent regret over not being a mother; this is not the hallmark of a woman who has the sort of conviction you're talking about.

[ajequals]

I'm reading this thinking How selfish some men are(I use to be one of them) to not want to Have a little mini me in your life. As far as the women with these claims I'm not really buying it either ..I have personally see there is not greater joy a women could have than having and raising a child and until a women conceives her body and mine does not change revealing that joy..Both of my children are adults. ,over Christmas I visited the oldest ,my son ..It was a very emotional experience actually staying with you child at his or her house for the first time. And those claims of ,I can't afford them or I don't have time or even this one, we travel. are just BS. you adapt to what ever falls in your path. something else I think about now is how lonely it would  be as I get older not to have them in my life ,no one to care about you , look in on you..and feel proud about bringing into this world and raise to be good people  ..At the moment my greatest accomplishments. , way more so than the money, cars, houses..

[Ellener]

@OP, sounds like your wife is just acknowledging her losses from exercising her choices.

I'd never regret having my only son but honestly it came at a high price...my husband the last time I asked him to leave he tried to strangle me, and then said he would take my son away from me, even then I ended up raising him on my own when his father checked out, then he came home ( son ) and said I'm a drug addict, what do I do? We sorted it but honestly, does anyone really choose to sign up for all this? For the best part of thirty years it seems.

 I think women today are wiser and more caring than ever. And one day the men will catch on and catch up!

Having a child now is a massive emotional and financial commitment, in the more developed world anyway. Just look at the finances of providing health care and college for a kid in America, which every child expects as their birth right. 

[SummerDreams]

There are various reasons a woman doesn't want a child and the reason "we travel a lot", while I respect it, I don't think it's very serious. There are women who don't want kids because they feel they are not stable enough themselves to raise them or they think the relationship with the H is not really strong or the H would not be the perfect father. I do have respect for these women who are able to think such a serious decision through and they don't take it lightly.

Society teaches women that they got to have kids because it's in our DNA. Thankfully women nowadays can decide for themselves whether they want kids or not.

[elaine567]

I think when having kids becomes impossible or a near impossibility. then for some woman, even women who were adamant about never having no kids, the whole finality of NEVER EVER having kids kicks in. For some that is a ,big shock. All very well to say "No kids ever" at 35, but there is always room to change one's mind, but at 55 it is all over and that can be upsetting for some...
I also think that as we age, parents die off and new dynasties start up in families, so the childless couple or the childless woman may no longer really "fit in".
Siblings and friends have founded their own family units and suddenly being voluntarily childless may not seem like such a good idea on hindsight.
Women tend to love family and so being the odd one out or excluded due to being seen as "different", can weight heavily.

[SummerDreams]

14 minutes ago, elaine567 said:

I think when having kids becomes impossible or a near impossibility. then for some woman, even women who were adamant about never having no kids, the whole finality of NEVER EVER having kids kicks in. For some that is a ,big shock. All very well to say "No kids ever" at 35, but there is always room to change one's mind, but at 55 it is all over and that can be upsetting for some...
I also think that as we age, parents die off and new dynasties start up in families, so the childless couple or the childless woman may no longer really "fit in".
Siblings and friends have founded their own family units and suddenly being voluntarily childless may not seem like such a good idea on hindsight.
Women tend to love family and so being the odd one out or excluded due to being seen as "different", can weight heavily.

So we should live our lives to please others and/or fit in? I don't plan to do that. I respect their choice to have kids, I don't see why they shouldn't respect mine to not have kids. 😕

There are not many things I have done or do in life that fit in with society's rules. Surely having a kid will not make me start doing them.

A couple of days ago my sister in law had a baby at 39. She says she is really happy. Good for her. The relatives started wishing me and my H that we have a baby too. We are together for 10 years, one would think that if we wanted kids we would have had them by now. I find this wish really disrespectful because if you can't have kids, this wish will only make you sad and if you don't want kids this wish disrespects your decisiond as a human and as a couple. This is why I don't like to participate in social events; people think what makes them happy should make you happy as well. 

[Prudence V]

13 hours ago, Woggle said:

it's easy to be maternal when they go home at the end of the day.

Yep. My H and I are close to his goddaughter, but no way would we want one of our own! Both of us didn’t want kids, but landed up through circumstances having them thrust on us... which just underlined our original choices, that we didn’t want kids! 
 

Her being close to a niece allows her the “nice bits” of kids without the awful bits - and while she’s expressing a “what if”, it could well be just what it is at face value rather than any deeper regret. 

[alphamale]

many childless 45 year old women wake up one morning and suddenly want a kid.  I've seen it many times

[preraph]

It's pretty easy to say you want a kid when you're too old to have one. She didn't want one bad enough to have one when she could.

[Els]

10 hours ago, Kitty Tantrum said:

No, motherhood (parenthood) isn't like other "paths in life." The drive to reproduce is part of our biological makeup.

I don't necessarily think so, I think we have the biological drive to have sex, not necessarily to reproduce. It's just that prior to the last century, there was no way to reliably separate the two, and not many other options for women economically - but now things are different.

If the drive to reproduce was genuinely biologically hardwired in the vast majority of people, there would be no need for the act of sex to evolve to feel enjoyable - sex could feel like rubbing your eyes and still serve its reproductive purpose. IMO it's quite clear that sex evolved to be enjoyable so that animals (of which humans are part of) would have sex, with reproduction being the consequence of it. Basically, sex is the carrot that our genes dangle in front of us in order to achieve the genes' goal - reproduction. The maternal drive is biologically hardwired in the sense of a female mammal feeling the urge to take care of an offspring that already exists, not in the sense of them desiring to have offspring. I'd recommend reading Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene" on this, it's an excellent book.

I do think that having a family IS a big part of our human tradition and cultural makeup, and that that is what leads some people to strongly desire one. It's not as easy to distinguish between nurture and nature as we think it is.

Woggle, re: your wife's thoughts, it really depends on how serious she is and how she felt about it beforehand. I do think it's normal for people to think about "what if"s. FWIW, I also know people WITH kids who have wondered what if they didn't have them, how their life could otherwise be - we just don't hear many of them because it's a much less socially-acceptable thing to say. It's just human nature IMO. To me, her words don't necessarily indicate any deep-seated feeling, but I don't know her personally and I don't know what her thoughts are. You'd have to ask her.

If she does feel strongly about wanting them, adoption is a possibility.

Edited January 14, 2020 by Elswyth

[SummerDreams]

25 minutes ago, alphamale said:

many childless 45 year old women wake up one morning and suddenly want a kid.  I've seen it many times

Many poor people want to get rich and have a big house. Your point being?

[SummerDreams]

25 minutes ago, preraph said:

It's pretty easy to say you want a kid when you're too old to have one. She didn't want one bad enough to have one when she could.

Exactly! My favorite moto is "what never happened is what we didn't crave enough" Nikos Kazantzakis

[DKT3]

I think people are confusing biological drives vs social drives. The desire for children is a biological drive. Not wanting kids is social drive.

If we could actually lord of the flies this thing there is one thing that is a certainty...there would be sex and children everything else is uncertain.  

[BC1980]

I think this is common when women get to the age where it becomes physically impossible (or at least inadvisable) to have kids. I was ambivalent about having kids in my 20s. Even I was a lot younger, I always felt that I wouldn't have kids. Like it was a forgone conclusion. 
 

I don't know what all of that means, but I did go through a "what if" time after I turned 35. At that time, you realize it's no longer a choice to remain childless, so you have to reckon with that. The ability to bear children is tied to your identity as a woman, so I think it's expected to register that change in circumstance. 
 

This sounds like your wife is just talking through some things. It doesn't sound like she is seriously upset or reconsidering. I would just be there to listen to her.

[Els]

29 minutes ago, DKT3 said:

I think people are confusing biological drives vs social drives. The desire for children is a biological drive.

Want to cite your sources?

It will be interesting to see what happens to birth rates once we truly have gender equality and universal access to contraception (and education on how to use it). Worldwide, the trend is that birth rates fall tremendously when this happens - and the pill is only 60 years old, a tiny blip in the history of "biology", with IUDs and vasectomies being newer. If the desire to reproduce was truly as ingrained in our biological makeup as the need to eat, sleep, have sex, and defecate, there would not be so many people opting out of it (or choosing to do much less of it than people did before) as soon as they had the option, IMO. We have invented many feeding methods that bypass the need to physically eat, with most of them being implemented in the era of the pill or earlier - 99.9999% of people still choose to physically eat instead of use them, unless required for medical reasons. You can't say the same about having children.

Edited January 14, 2020 by Elswyth