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It’s also so manipulative & immature to act like you didn’t actively participate in trying to have a second (& third!) child. Maybe he was feeling legitimate ambivalence in the very very hard times of multiples losses & raising a little one. But then he went ahead anyway. He didn’t say, let’s stop. It is totally not functional to behave passive aggressively in this manner. He seems like he quiet quit a long time ago. What a difficult & disorienting experience for the writer.

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I really wish people (esp men) would read these stories to understand why young women do not want to marry and have kids with men (or at all). When fathers behave badly the number one, most common response I read / hear is “she chose wrong” and “shouldn’t she have found out her partner was like that BEFORE marrying him / having kids with him?” Men are not like washing machines or cars that have performance more or less consistent with their initial activity. Mating is a dynamic process and men actively respond (read: CHANGE) to the environment and circumstances. Men will say / do almost anything to gain sexual access to a woman, but once he’s secured that access, the reality sets in and his efforts start to approach zero. This is the most important fact about the male “cycle” that girls and women need to know.

If men decide after the fact that they don’t want children (or you) they might do mildly evil shit like this, or they might kill you and your children. Pregnancy and post partum is the most common time for men to initiate physical violence against the mothers of their own children. It’s very very uncommon for men to be this level of demonic at the onset of a relationship (and even if they are there’s all of society reminding women we need to give unpleasant men “a chance” and change them with our love / sexual access / promise of a family). How are women supposed to predict which men are going to decide after the fact to be complete psychos and which ones are safe to have around for the decades it takes to raise a couple kids? The smarter option is to opt out, and that’s what many women are doing. 💁‍♀️

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Here’s the thing, if men don’t want more kids they should take an active role in birth control. Have a vasectomy or buy condoms or maybe stop having sex. You are responsible for all the children you produce, regardless of whether you intended to or wanted to. Women throughout history have been raising unwanted babies conceived through rape and reproductive coercion with love and care.

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This hits so hard in a lot of ways. Im also quiet quitting on my husband of 8 years. We have a 4.5 year old and 2.5 year old. They’re 21 months apart. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Our first pregnancy was conceived through the not-preventing-but-not-TTC method. We’d talked about having kids while dating and engaged and I thought we were on the same page. With that first pregnancy, when I told him I was expecting, he got mad asf. He went on a FML rant that really confused me. I was 25, he was 27, and I was just starting my career and he was making a career change but overall was stable. He was going off about how “disappointed his parents would be” and all kinds of stuff. I was scared, so I actually called his parents and announced the pregnancy to them. They were really happy and said they didn’t understand why he was so afraid they’d be disappointed. He acted like we were 15 and 16 or something. At 11 weeks, I miscarried & had to have a D&C. He seemed upset and immediately wanted to start actively TTC. I told him I would like at least a couple of months to recover and he respected that. He was patient with me and supportive through the miscarriage. Fast forward to a few months later, we conceived my now 4.5 year old, then while I was on BC, we unexpectedly conceived my 2.5 year old. I had a very hard time with 2 under 2 and still struggle to this day with having 2 so close in age. The oldest is neurodivergent so it makes things extra challenging. My husband puts his career above everything. The longest he’s ever parented both kids solo is 17 hours (part of that was overnight). He’s never once parented alone from sun up to sun down. Their care solely is me with him maybe doing a preschool drop off or daycare pickup 3-4 times per month because he was explicitly asked. I had a pretty bad burnout meltdown last weekend and I packed my shit and left for the night. I was overstimulated asf and touched out. My husband had to get my mom’s help and told her that he thought I was going to un-alive myself after the miscarriage (I wasn’t, I just was really depressed afterwards like most women who experience it are) so he had our kids to make me happy and he just doesn’t understand why I’m so upset and overwhelmed all the time. My mom told me she explained to him how I needed more support and how no matter how badly one wants kids, it’s still brutal work when they’re babies and toddlers and you aren’t sleeping for the first 5 years. She said that it just didn’t “click” with him. I also will never forget last year when I had been alone with both kids for about 2 weeks and just wanted a break, he told me “If I had known being a mother would make you so miserable, I never would’ve had kids with you” and then went onto say that his own other never got stressed with her 4 kids. I truly believe he sees our kids are things he gave me and not as 2 beings he willingly helped me create.

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