Having children ruins everything

[mashiara]

You know what terrifies me? I'm finally going back to work in September, after being on leave of one sort or another since the beginning of my pregnancy. How on earth am I going to face a classroom full of children, prepare my lessons and teach all those different subjects, when I can barely manage to put two thoughts together some days?

ETA Min, take him to the theater. I think 3 is old enough to give it a try. If he starts looking uncomfortable or acting up, then you get up and leave I guess.

I've been following a couple of mommy boards in my copious spare time, but I never find the energy to post there. I'm very good at stalking various people though. :)

[dalThor]

I too feel as though I've gotten a lot more stupid. I find myself looking for a word (in real life, and worse, in a class) and I just can't come up with it. I find myself skimming lots of stuff too. I like reading the politics thread but it's sometimes hard just keeping up with reading it much less following it.

Luckily, I love the little demon-bastards to death and I have a great wife (that in all honesty, up to now has been doing much of the heavy lifting as far as the babies are concerned). When she goes back to work in the fall we'll both be in for some even more serious trouble.

[Minaku]

You know what terrifies me? I'm finally going back to work in September, after being on leave of one sort or another since the beginning of my pregnancy. How on earth am I going to face a classroom full of children, prepare my lessons and teach all those different subjects, when I can barely manage to put two thoughts together some days?

ETA Min, take him to the theater. I think 3 is old enough to give it a try. If he starts looking uncomfortable or acting up, then you get up and leave I guess.

I've been following a couple of mommy boards in my copious spare time, but I never find the energy to post there. I'm very good at stalking various people though. :)

I say start now... you need to give yourself a bit of time to ramp up to full course teaching. Unless you wing it, like I do. Start reading the latest articles and such, brush up on old things you're supposed to know.

[Eponine]

Mina, if these last few years are you at 40% of normal, the rest of us are really dumb. I'm not trying to be dismissive of you at all, i.e. saying that it isn't actually harder for you to think at a high level, but from having seen you post for years, you certainly don't seem less intelligent now then previously.

I would guess there's probably a mommy board aspect to it. Here in Gen Chat, it's not at the top of my brain the vast majority of the time whether any given boarder has or doesn't have children - and a lot do. But usually when I'm around other women with young children, they spend almost all of their time talking about personal problems and bits of gossip from their lives. And I find myself thinking - if this is how women are after having children, I don't want any part of it. But if I think about it, if they DIDN'T have children, most of them wouldn't be spending a lot of their time engaging in a high level of conversation. There's nothing special about parenthood and stupidity, being female and 30, a lot of other women near my age happen to have young children. I remember when I was 20 and these same type of people were boring and gossipy and childless. For me at least, if I spend a lot of time talking about life gossip, it's harder to re-engage in board-type conversations. If I had a reason to spend more time talking with people who misuse "jaded", I'd feel like I was getting more stupid too.

Anyway, if I were going to have kids, you, Mina, are who I'd want to emulate (and hope to talk to about that soon).

[Whitestripe]

Um..... I've got some bad news. Henzo's 8 (*gasp*) and I'm still waiting for my brain cells to come back. And I'm not so sure about Mommy IQ points, either. I mean just when you get one thing figured out, they go and change the rules and you're back at square one. Give me a toddler to potty train and I'm all over it, but God help me if I know what to do on a second-grade field trip.

I think that there used to be room in my brain for intelligent discourse, but now it's all cluttered up with which kid has Little League on what night and what day which kid needs to wear sneakers for gym class or be sure to take their library books back to school.

[mashiara]

Hehehe "the heavy lifting", literally. Let me tell you, these little bastards are heavy!

If we are going to talk mommy-board type of things, here's a question. Why is there such a difference in the way doctors advice you to feed your babies between countries? Pediatricians here insist on homemade pureed (sp?) food until the babies are more than a year old, where as far as I can tell Americans insist on babies feeding themselves finger food and regular food long before that. It's getting harder and harder to feed the two of them, they've started resenting us spoon feeding them but if I let them have a go at it themselves I fear they will eat practically nothing.

I say start now... you need to give yourself a bit of time to ramp up to full course teaching. Unless you wing it, like I do. Start reading the latest articles and such, brush up on old things you're supposed to know.

Sigh. Wise advice. Now if you could only tell me where I could find the time to do this when the ONLY time I have to myself is now, after 10pm, and all I want to do now is fall asleep -which I'll probably be doing pretty soon. It doesn't help that I don't know what grade I'll be teaching yet, those get assigned in September.

[Newsun]

For one thing, I'd be willing to bet the intelligent discussion found here is more difficult to understand than all but the most rigorous of college courses/discussions. I also feel the same way in needing more than one read through of the more convoluted posts to understand them, and I'll admit there's times where something goes over my head. While I (thankfully) can't say I've experienced what felt like an iq drop due to kids, when I was put on two psych medications I forced the hospital I was staying at to let me go off them for a few days before I underwent psych and academic testing, because I felt like the meds negatively impacted my intelligence and ability to solve problems.

[S John]

Um..... I've got some bad news. Henzo's 8 (*gasp*) and I'm still waiting for my brain cells to come back. And I'm not so sure about Mommy IQ points, either. I mean just when you get one thing figured out, they go and change the rules and you're back at square one. Give me a toddler to potty train and I'm all over it, but God help me if I know what to do on a second-grade field trip.

It's interesting to me to watch how people who have had young children interact with other people's babies or young kids. Get my mom around an infant and she just knows what to do with it. But, like.. me, for example. I spent some time visiting family recently and my almost 3 yr old cousin was around much of the time. Once he stopped being afraid of me he wanted me to play with his cars with him, which I did, but after spending some time with him I came to the realization that I have NO IDEA how to interact with a person that age. No idea. Basically if they are under 12 then I'm at a complete loss. But veteran parents will step into a situation involving kids and just handle shit, no problem.

[TerraPrime]

What S John said.

Also, to all the new parents: *hugs*

[MercenaryChef]

It's interesting to me to watch how people who have had young children interact with other people's babies or young kids.

you are still a youngster, otter-friend.

i am without kiddies, but i am somehow able to deal well with them. kair's niece loves the hell out of me. she likes to play soccer with me. it tends mainly to consist of me stepping the ball away from her, booting it down the field and having her chase it down and clumsily dribbling it back. but, it works for us.

and nobody ever forgets how to play cars, dude.

[Eponine]

My grandmother never knew what to do with babies, interaction-wise, despite having four of her own. She liked children when they were old enough to have some imagination. She wasn't interested in doing much with the grand-babies. Since I can't remember being a baby, I remember her as being a wonderful grandparent, although my parents say she pretty much didn't play with me until I was about four. I expect babies that I interact with will fail to care about my indifference in much the same way.

[S John]

you are still a youngster, otter-friend.

i am without kiddies, but i am somehow able to deal well with them. kair's niece loves the hell out of me. she likes to play soccer with me. it tends mainly to consist of me stepping the ball away from her, booting it down the field and having her chase it down and clumsily dribbling it back. but, it works for us.

and nobody ever forgets how to play cars, dude.

It's definitely not an issue of forgetting how to play cars! It's more like.. I've been playing cars with this kid for 2 1/2 hours and he's not tired of it. How do I politely excuse myself from further cars-playing without upsetting him so that I can go watch television in peace? If I left the room, he would follow me, hold out a car, look up at me and ask.. play? I don't know how to say no to that. If the kid were older I could be like, look here are the reasons why I cannot play cars with you right now. But for a little kid like that there are only two types of people in the world, people who are playing cars with him and assholes.

[MercenaryChef]

It's definitely not an issue of forgetting how to play cars! It's more like.. I've been playing cars with this kid for 2 1/2 hours and he's not tired of it. How do I politely excuse myself from further cars-playing without upsetting him so that I can go watch television in peace? If I left the room, he would follow me, hold out a car, look up at me and ask.. play? I don't know how to say no to that. If the kid were older I could be like, look here are the reasons why I cannot play cars with you right now. But for a little kid like that there are only two types of people in the world, people who are playing cars with him and assholes.

i actually can relate.

the niece would chase a soccer ball until my leg fell off. i can understand. that is where a good parent comes in and says 'uncle otter needs a shot of whisky and some tv, go and get fucked, kid.'

the niece's parents are cool though. they understand and will send the child's interest elsewhere before i get a career ending hamstring injury.

[sologdin]

mina--

it didn't happen to me, but wife transformed from a lefty intellectual with keen interests in the arts and hard sciences into a kardashian/real housewives regular. just doesn't have energy to read as much, and her spoken discourse, when regarding serious things, tends to be dogmatic and unyielding, rather than deliberative and responsive.

[Fez]

It's interesting to me to watch how people who have had young children interact with other people's babies or young kids. Get my mom around an infant and she just knows what to do with it. But, like.. me, for example. I spent some time visiting family recently and my almost 3 yr old cousin was around much of the time. Once he stopped being afraid of me he wanted me to play with his cars with him, which I did, but after spending some time with him I came to the realization that I have NO IDEA how to interact with a person that age. No idea. Basically if they are under 12 then I'm at a complete loss. But veteran parents will step into a situation involving kids and just handle shit, no problem.

Hell, I've got cousins that are 14 that I have no idea what to talk about with. I'm fine with a baby, just a lot of cooing and holding and rocking and smiling and so forth (so long as the parents are around to deal with the diapers and feeding and such), but once they can walk and talk I'm at a loss.

And I'm really far behind on my plan to be insanely wealthy and able to afford live in help. Someone find me a rich woman to marry!

[Elder Sister]

Oh my God. Thank you.

You're welcome. Nobody tells you about this...and being around women who still have time and money for hair/nails/doctorates/boyfriends/sex/exotic vacays just makes it worse. And then when you survive your little children, they turn into teenagers and you get to deal with drugs/jail/tattoos/piercings/sex/speeding tickets, etc. Or hopefully, only a few of those.

So, basically, when they're little, you don't have any fun, and when they get older, you don't have any fun, and they do.

Parenthood is not for the faint of heart.

[Newsun]

drugs/jail/tattoos/piercings/sex/speeding tickets

Hahaha you hit the nail on the head for teenagers

[Minaku]

Mina, if these last few years are you at 40% of normal, the rest of us are really dumb. I'm not trying to be dismissive of you at all, i.e. saying that it isn't actually harder for you to think at a high level, but from having seen you post for years, you certainly don't seem less intelligent now then previously.

I would guess there's probably a mommy board aspect to it. Here in Gen Chat, it's not at the top of my brain the vast majority of the time whether any given boarder has or doesn't have children - and a lot do. But usually when I'm around other women with young children, they spend almost all of their time talking about personal problems and bits of gossip from their lives. And I find myself thinking - if this is how women are after having children, I don't want any part of it. But if I think about it, if they DIDN'T have children, most of them wouldn't be spending a lot of their time engaging in a high level of conversation. There's nothing special about parenthood and stupidity, being female and 30, a lot of other women near my age happen to have young children. I remember when I was 20 and these same type of people were boring and gossipy and childless. For me at least, if I spend a lot of time talking about life gossip, it's harder to re-engage in board-type conversations. If I had a reason to spend more time talking with people who misuse "jaded", I'd feel like I was getting more stupid too.

Anyway, if I were going to have kids, you, Mina, are who I'd want to emulate (and hope to talk to about that soon).

Aw, thank you Ep! :love: Yes, a lot of the people on the mommy boards are exactly the same as they were prepreg/prekids, and the desire to be an intellectual isn't one that's commonly found across the population. I recall having a conversation regarding the usage of the word wife and whether it should be eliminated from the vernacular in an egalitarian society. The woman to whom I was talking is childless and plans to stay childless, and she basically ended the argument by telling me I have too much time on my hands to be thinking about such things, and that people who DO think about things like this are essentially spinsters with no sex lives and probably have mustaches and are sad in every way.

This really just means I have to try to post on the Board more often, so I can up my IQ through vigorous head-scratching and avoidance of Sologdin posts (I love you Solo).

Hehehe "the heavy lifting", literally. Let me tell you, these little bastards are heavy!

If we are going to talk mommy-board type of things, here's a question. Why is there such a difference in the way doctors advice you to feed your babies between countries? Pediatricians here insist on homemade pureed (sp?) food until the babies are more than a year old, where as far as I can tell Americans insist on babies feeding themselves finger food and regular food long before that. It's getting harder and harder to feed the two of them, they've started resenting us spoon feeding them but if I let them have a go at it themselves I fear they will eat practically nothing.

Sigh. Wise advice. Now if you could only tell me where I could find the time to do this when the ONLY time I have to myself is now, after 10pm, and all I want to do now is fall asleep -which I'll probably be doing pretty soon. It doesn't help that I don't know what grade I'll be teaching yet, those get assigned in September.

Here in AMERICA! we pride our kids on being independent from the minute they're shoved through the constricting vaginal canal of life. A lot of people think babies should sleep on their own, soothe on their own, and basically eat on their own from an ungodly young age. I think you can find a happy medium between the American and Greek school of thought. To demonstrate how well my brain can hold an idea, I am now thinking about all the stereotypes of Greek families and Greek grandmothers and their smothering, let-me-do-that-for-you love. Anyway, I think you'll find that letting them self-feed will eventually result in success. Either they'll get pissed off and learn to coordinate their hands with their mouths, or they will squall and you will help them. Win-win.

When I was practicing for my graduate recital I did it in 5-30 minute chunks spread out over the entire day. Besides the fact that I had a baby to deal with, my brain, after a long day of concentration, could only focus on something as complicated as practice for 5 minutes. They did end up being very productive minutes, though. Maybe if you attack articles and reading like that, in chunks, and then take the time to bullet-point what you've read at the end, you will be able to get through work.

For one thing, I'd be willing to bet the intelligent discussion found here is more difficult to understand than all but the most rigorous of college courses/discussions. I also feel the same way in needing more than one read through of the more convoluted posts to understand them, and I'll admit there's times where something goes over my head. While I (thankfully) can't say I've experienced what felt like an iq drop due to kids, when I was put on two psych medications I forced the hospital I was staying at to let me go off them for a few days before I underwent psych and academic testing, because I felt like the meds negatively impacted my intelligence and ability to solve problems.

I will readily admit that the level of discussion here is far and away more complicated than the stuff that can be found in colleges. We have a lot of intellectuals with alphabet soup after their names on the board, and this is the one place where I think they feel they can cut loose and allow themselves the freedom to explore topics without boring people. There are also people here who are quite gifted with the written word and enjoy writing, so their posts are more densely populated with ideas. It makes for a lot of ah, academic reading sometimes.

Most everything goes over my head. I will also admit this. Complex ideas do not a happy Mina make.

mina--

it didn't happen to me, but wife transformed from a lefty intellectual with keen interests in the arts and hard sciences into a kardashian/real housewives regular. just doesn't have energy to read as much, and her spoken discourse, when regarding serious things, tends to be dogmatic and unyielding, rather than deliberative and responsive.

Kardashian and the housewives?! Unreal!

Does she have any desire to return to her multisyllabic, debate-team ways?

You're welcome. Nobody tells you about this...and being around women who still have time and money for hair/nails/doctorates/boyfriends/sex/exotic vacays just makes it worse. And then when you survive your little children, they turn into teenagers and you get to deal with drugs/jail/tattoos/piercings/sex/speeding tickets, etc. Or hopefully, only a few of those.

So, basically, when they're little, you don't have any fun, and when they get older, you don't have any fun, and they do.

Parenthood is not for the faint of heart.

I think I can handle the teens as I've been handling teens for many more years than I've been handling the littles. But man, you hit it on the head. You want all that stuff, but then you remind yourself that you spawned and you have a great personal responsibility to make sure they don't grow up to be sociopathic murderers, though if they had it their way (toddlers!) they'd go and do just that. The worst are the ones who have kids and yet still do things like get their hair cut and have manicures and have vacations and what is sex? I don't know.

[Sophelia]

If it's any consolation, psychologists have been trying to find any evidence of actual memory/attention differences in pregnant or new mothers for years, and have turned up, as far as I know, turned up nothing reliable (you need to compare memory before pregnancy, which few studies do). It seems that the belief in memory failings is very much stronger than any actual failings. I only know about this because a colleague in my department has been one of the researchers in the area (herself a mother of three). A huge study in Australia has confirmed her findings. The conclusion to the study is:

we were [...] not able to establish substantial or consistent cognitive deficits. Except in a brief period in later pregnancy, these findings challenge the common myth that women develop ‘placenta brain’ or ‘ baby brain’. We found no deficits on memory tests in particular. Since both women and their partners believe that women experience cognitive deficits in pregnancy ... women and their partners need to be encouraged to be less automatic in their willingness to attribute common memory lapses to the salient causal factor of a growing or new baby. Obstetricians, general family doctors and midwives may need to use the findings from this study to promote the view that ‘ placenta brain’ is not inevitable, and that perceptions of impairment may reflect emotional or other unknown factors.

In other words, your memory and attention is probably exactly the same as it would have been had you not been pregnant. However (this is my speculation) it may be that having children causes you to deploy that memory and attention differently, so you could have part of your attentional capacity reserved thinking about the children/what you need to be doing next, leaving less of it for non-child-related tasks. But if you're in a lab (or a classroom) where your attention will be 100% on the job at hand, you'll have all your mental resources free and your intellect will work just fine.

P.S. I'm childless and my brain often feels like mush too :P

[Eponine]

it didn't happen to me, but wife transformed from a lefty intellectual with keen interests in the arts and hard sciences into a kardashian/real housewives regular.

Jesus Christ. I find this stomach wrenchingly terrifying. I want to be careful about what I say because it's not my intention to be insulting toward Solo's wife or make this overly personal... and I'm slightly at a loss for words...

One thing about having children that I've always thought would be about the worst possible thing is the extent to which having a child in some way could make you a "different" person. I realize that there are many things in one's life that change you in various ways, both choices that you make and things out of your control. I also realize that it's necessary and desirable for a person's priorities to change after having a child.

But it seriously freaks me out when it seems like a mother's goals and interests undergo a total change. And the claim from certain mothers that basically you'll love being this new sort of person and wouldn't even want to be the old person again makes it even more horrific to me. Now, I can intellectualize the idea that if I were a parent, I would want to set boundaries on my work schedule in order to spend more time with my child. It's not something that at this point, I can imagine desiring, but I have no problem accepting that it's probably something I'd want if I were a parent. However, in order to want to be a full time SAHM, pretty much everything about me would have to turn completely upside-down. At this point, one might ask - would that really be a bad thing? What if what you thought you wanted for yourself was only because you hadn't experienced motherhood? Well, from where I am now, the prospect doesn't make me happy and honestly, I think it's probably not the best use of an excess of grad school, but I can see the point. It wouldn't necessarily be bad for my desires to do a 180 if my new goals were good ones.

But if there was the possibility that something could change in me where not only were my old (in this case, current) personality and interests no longer my first priority but I didn't even have that personality or those interests anymore, and instead changed into a person that right now, I wouldn't even like to spend time with, that's fucking terrifying. In other words, how does someone whose interests used to be arts and hard sciences become a Real Housewives regular? And of course there's always an aspect of choice - I could choose to continue working or I could choose to keep the TV turned off - but this is about tastes and preferences. Even if I chose not to have a TV, would I still be the kind of person who would rather turn on Real Housewives than read a book if both were available to me? And I'm not trying to dump on Solo's wife as if I think I'm different from her - what confounds me is that I suspect from his description, if you'd asked her 10 years ago what kind of person she wanted to be, she'd have wanted to develop the interests she had then (with or without a child) and would not have wanted to watch junk TV. I'd like to think that you can't become a completely different person out of your control, unless maybe you have a brain injury, but I've always been scared that having children could be the catalyst to turning into someone you don't want to be. And it doesn't matter if there's counterexamples like Mina if it's something that you can't choose for yourself in advance - that is, to say "I'd NEVER become someone who [x]".