Baby-Making Machines
“We would like to announce that we are adding the VERY LAST addition to our family. The one definitely came as a shock and proves that the coil definitely isn’t 100% effective. We’ve gotten our heads around it now and we’re very happy to be adding to the madness. Final baby due in November!”
It was that Facebook post that ruined my day before I’d even have a chance to wipe the sleep from my eyes this morning. That post from the second wife of Soldier Boy – Number 26. Otherwise known as The Neighbour’s Husband.
Here’s a little more I wrote about him in case you fancy a little more light reading:
He’s no longer married to the woman he cheated with me on, the mother of his first two boys. He’s now with wife number two, had the baby girl he and wife number one had always dreamed of (and wife number one still hasn’t had*), and they’re now expecting their second child together, Soldier Boy’s fourth in total.
*Wife number one is now married to husband number two and had baby boy number three with him
Soldier Boy isn’t even thirty yet.
Did you keep up with all that? Wait, I’m not finished yet. The woman he’s married to now – wife number two? He had an affair with her. Soldier Boy cheated on wife number one with wife number two. And wife number two cheated on husband number one with Soldier boy. She had a kid with hubs numero uno too.
Jeremy Kyle, eat your heart out.
It pisses me off. I’m pissed off. What are these people doing? Making up, breaking up, having affairs all over the place and bringing a whole bunch of kids into their dysfunctional relationships at the same time. It really PISSES me off. Maybe a little irrationally because their lives have nothing to do with me, and I probably could just digitally-delete the lot of them, but seriously? What the fuck is going on with human beings these days? We just makeup and breakup, procreating like it doesn’t matter, popping out kids like baby-making factories. We have no fucking respect for each other and worse than that, we have no respect for life, for the kids we are inevitably fucking up as we go. Well, not me. These other people, the ‘old friends’ I’m totally judging right now. Secretly, obviously.
I haven’t had kids. I could have done. There was a period of my life I was almost silly enough. I had a miscarriage from a pregnancy I wasn’t aware of, a miscarriage that although I shouldn’t say it, I’m actually thankful for. It wasn’t meant to be. In fact, it was a bloody stupid idea. Everyone knew it, including my body, and if I had known, if I had told him, it probably wouldn’t have stopped him beating me.
But I want kids. I’m almost thirty. My biological clock is ticking away. It’s something I’ve made no secret of on this blog but in real life, I just brush my broodiness under the carpet. I’m good at doing that. After all, I get ridiculed by my own family in front of their closest friends and relatives so over time, you learn to use a humour defence mechanism to deal with the awkward questions like, “Oh, so how come you haven’t had kids yet?” or “Hmmm, no kids? Career woman?”. One time a relative even asked if I were gay because of my lack of reproduction.
But these people – Soldier Boy and his growing number of wives and babies, they just procreate like it doesn’t matter, and keep procreating too. Like they don’t know how to stop or it’s okay for them to have babies after just a short period of time together. Like it’s okay if Mom and Pops split and the kids ends up involved in some tug of war that, in my experience with Soldier Boy, ends up with the kids coming off worse. Wife number one recently told me he doesn’t bother with the two boys they had together. It’s actually a heart-breaking thought. I thought he was a better man than that. He always seemed to dote on his kids. I guess it’s mother-relationship-dependant. That’s not a dad in my eyes. That’s a lowlife waste of space.
It just breaks my heart annoys me because I’m sensible and don’t procreate because I wouldn’t want to put a child through that. I could quite easily have gotten pregnant whilst dating Jock, and he even told me that an ‘accidental baby’ would be the one thing pretty much guaranteed to kick him up the ass and get him to sort his shit out. Was I stupid enough to do that? No, of course I wasn’t. I’m not an asshole, or a dumb twit. I go to desperate measures to make damn sure I don’t accidentally get pregnant. Have you ever taken the morning after pill?
The Hubby also desperately wanted to hurry up and get me up the duff, to make sure I couldn’t ever escape his abusive clutches. Even when I was stupid enough to stay with him when he beat me to a pulp, I wasn’t stupid enough to believe it was the right foundation for a child. The same can be said for Big Love on the other side of the world. He wanted a child so badly but I knew his drug habit would make it impossible for us to be the parents I wanted us to be.
But all those times I deliberately put off having a child, because the timing wasn’t right or because I wasn’t done globe-trotting yet, or because the guy I was with definitely didn’t have his shit together enough to be able to call himself a father… Was it for nothing? I don’t regret not having kids with those men, not at all. But I always said I didn’t want to be an ‘older’ mother. I wanted to have kids in my twenties. Late-twenties, admittedly but still my twenties. My twenties are up. I’m basically a few weeks away from thirty. I’m still childless. I’m still single. My career isn’t going half-bad but I know it won’t be enough to keep me happy forever.
I’m getting a little scared that I won’t find a man who I’d be happy to have children with. Like maybe my standards of parenting and not wanting to breakup and have my kids call someone step-mum are unreachable goals. But I can’t have kids with someone I can’t say I’m 100% sure about. I definitely don’t want to end up being a 30-something single mother. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, I have the most upmost respect for single mothers (mostly because I have NO IDEA how they do it!), I’m just saying I don’t want that – I want to avoid that as much as possible. I don’t want to be a single mother full stop. I don’t want to end up like my mother although I do love her. And that’s why I haven’t had kids.
But waking up to these bullshit announcements from baby-making machines is seriously pissing me off. The population of the earth is already high enough, and I bet neither Soldier boy and wife number two last in the long run, nor wife number one and her new guy. I’d like to put money on it. Then the cycle starts again – more babies with new partners, last babies left behind and forgotten about.
What the fuck is wrong with people? And why does it make me so mad?
