Depression and what it's really like

is it still pretty common for women to get advice that having a kid will solve their life problems?

i just deleted a big long winded post but basically, i am aware of all of this and wish it didn't make me feel like my value as a person in society weren't dramatically reduced as a woman who has chosen not to be a mother, but unfortch this seems to be true generally speaking
and i do not need to be consoled about this, as i enjoy my life for the most part
i just want my life to have value as a productive member of society (which i believe it does)
this is why it brings me down, apologies for not explaining this earlier

is it still pretty common for women to get advice that having a kid will solve their life problems?

― Nhex, Wednesday, December 3, 2014 5:13 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes.

obviously

That makes me sad that you feel that it lessens your value in society! :( I would never think that but I realize that might not the normal mindset, sadly. I don't understand what the connection is between your post and the topic or maybe that's the reason you've chosen not to and I missed that somewhere.

is it still pretty common for women to get advice that having a kid will solve their life problems?

― Nhex, Wednesday, December 3, 2014 5:13 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yes.

― carl agatha, Wednesday, December 3, 2014 12:22 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Thankfully I've never gotten this advice. In fact, anyone I've ever spoken to about having kids has been pretty straight up in admitting that children put a strain on most aspects of life and make things way more difficult.

after a brief mental survey, i can say that most people i know who have said "having kids gave me a reason to wake up in the morning" are men with the exception of one. all of the people who say "it's like having a cake in the oven literally all the time" are women. i don't have to go through it to see that the experience is vastly different for girls, and i am a woman.

i don't feel that it lessens my value in society, i believe that there are a lot of people who believe that based on the number of times i have been consoled about how it's ok to not have kids. it's just one of those topics, like being an only child.

I guess maybe I've never experienced that because I've never said to anyone that I don't want or am not ever having kids but having been the recipient of the only child bs I can see how awful that must be.

exactly
this is why i said "oh i dunno" for a really long time

now i'm bummed out

I have heard from a great many people who feel that their problem, whether it's depression or even an unhappy marriage is going to be resolved by having a kid. I get the reasoning, to an extent -- the things that are most likely to improve your mental health are staying busy and having an ongoing project that keeps you moving. If it brings you joy, that's a bonus. Basically a kid is, for some people, a really fulfilling project.

There's nothing wrong with that, but the flip side of that, that people feel guilt because it's seen as an essential part of the adult experience (it's not) or people that do have a kid but continue to be depressed (or, as in the other case I mentioned, still have a mediocre-to-bad marriage) is a lot more potentially negative.

It took me a long time to realize that some things that help other people stay mentally sound aren't for me, and I should feel no guilt about that.

so: find what you love, keep on movin', and when you can't love anything, look for help

"whether it's depression or even an unhappy marriage is going to be resolved by having a kid"

But a kid isn't a fucking project! I get it too but I thought that by now most even slightly intelligent people would realize that having a band-aid baby is the worst idea ever.

Conclusion: people are still dumb. Especially the kind that would think and/or voice this kind of opinion.

I think people forget that a kid is both a human being that they have to provide (an environment) for, with no idea of how that human will grow and mature, _and_ a project.

euler, i appreciate that some people may not be personally moved by these concerns. i'm just suggesting that they're wrong not to be, and proposing that if they're not, it may be because they're fundamentally thinking more of their own lives than of those of their potential children. (what seems natural is not much of a guide, either, i think - how much of what people think about sex and gender 'seems natural' to them but seems wrong upon consideration??) if for example a person thinks, well, life is pretty alright, all things considered, and so my kid's life would probably be, too (and of course i'll do everything i can to make it that way for them, etc)—then they stand a chance of minimizing, let's say, a residual possibility dependent on the difference between lives, between their life and the kid's life, that the kid's life will just turn out NOT to be pretty alright, in a way the kid can't change, or escape, or accommodate herself to, or come to terms with, etc. it's a matter of the jemeinigkeit/mineness of one's existence, so it (were this possibility to come to be) is not something the parent can do anything about, either - they can't anticipate it, prepare the kid for it, etc. put in pascallian terms, having a kid is like putting the kid's happiness in life at stake (to uncertain risk, in a gamble) as well as your own.

this has nothing to do with whether you see your kid-having as a project or not etc too, that just brings out the core possibility that i think would be there in any case, and would not necessarily be mitigated by being a loving well-providing parent raising an independently existing being.

so: find what you love, keep on movin', and when you can't love anything, look for help

― valleys of your mind (mh), Wednesday, December 3, 2014 12:04 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark
amen

sorry crüt
on the upside, i was thinking about you today!

xps

I think there's just a bit of slipshod semantics at work here. A kid is not a project, but raising a kid is a project. It is possible to devolve the project of raising a child almost entirely to chance, to whomever happens to be available, and a deeply depressed parent may not be available to participate in raising their own child. Nothing is automatic as ENBB points out.

exactly

Raising myself is a project. I'd hate to think that would still be the case on the offchance that I had children (which looks like a ship that has sailed at this point).

My whole kids not being a "project" was that they're so much more and the responsibility of having them is pretty much the most serious and heavy thing. Just to clarify. These fucked up people thinking that having a child will fix things in any way whatsoever seem to be missing the weight of that decision somehow.

yeah, by "project" I mean "this will be a time and emotional investment, every day, probably for the rest of your life" style of thing. something that you are investing yourself in.

not quite like knitting a hat

No I realize that - I just wanted to clarify even tho it probably wasn't necessary.

:)

As a product of my mother's attempt to keep hold of a failing relationship, I feel pretty qualified in saying that it doesn't work and either one or both parents end up resenting the kid.

j I get your line but another way to see it, in jamesian terms, is that the possible good of the kid's life can't be realized unless you give her that chance.

it's true that we would be makint this decision, rather than the kid, but that's also the case on your line! I don't see how to adjudicate this without a leap of faith, either way

well, not having the kid seems importantly different from having it (in either the case of its life being good or the case of its being bad).

there's no kid without a kid being born - there's no person who wouldn't have suffered being dragged into suffering - there's just a human life, whatever the hell that is. and a human life is made up of a billion facets, some of which might be considered wonderful and some of which might be considered horrible, but to judge the creation of human life wholly on the possibilities of experiencing the horrible feels like a very one-sided way of judging?

and other people's judgements are gonna vary wildly on whether life is worth having, of course, especially on this thread, and so they should. but anybody who co-creates another human being cannot be making a clear-sighted decision to add to the sum of misery or happiness in the world because the outcomes are more or less unknowable

depressives are p. good at that xp

god yeah absolutely. i just think that broadly speaking the having of children is not a decision grounded in consequentialism

there are always too many children as it is

to be clear, i am not saying it is bad to have a kid because the kid might (i.e. there is some probability of it) have a bad life.

i am saying that every person who turns out to have had a bad life ~in that way~, especially, that nobody-else-can-do-anything-for-you-it's-ultimately-up-to-you-or-nobody way, which of course is not one in principle which can have been foreseen or anticipated (it's just a possibility that comes with having a life of your own), has their life because their parents brought them into existence. i am also saying that what the parents CAN foresee, do something about, is the having or the not having of the kid. if they have the kid, they also make that kind of unhappy life a possibility for the kid. the salient point about their doing so is not the likelihood of its happening, it's that, should it happen, the burden will ultimately fall on the kid who has to live that unhappy life, rather than on the parent who chose to give it to them with no way of securing that it be happy. and whether it does is not something the parent can know in advance. it's like pascal's flip of the coin. but in view of the parents' prospective responsibility, and their presumed concern for the happiness of the life of their prospective kid, the matter of fact at stake with the flip of the coin is not, does god exist or not, but, will my kid have a non-miserable or a miserable life despite my best efforts. i am suggesting that the prospect of the latter possibility should dominate a prospective parent's considerations about whether or not to have a kid, just because to have been the cause of another's unhappy life (just where you would have wished the opposite for them) would be so profoundly bad that the prospect of a happier life for the other, however much more likely it is than the bare possibility of the other's being stuck with a miserable life, could not weigh more heavily.

i don't think that's a consequentialist argument, except in the broadest sense that it does involve considering the value of possible results of one's action. i would not be surprised if a more deontological-sounding version could be given.

btw are we ok to continue to debate this here? cos i don't want to bull-headedly keep arguing on this thread if it's upsetting people who use it to address aspects of their own depression, but i think it's an interesting subject and wd happily move it to another thread if that seems more apt

all i see is a wall of text with CAN in the top-middle so do whatever you please afaic

hey some of us are using this discussion to address aspects of their own depression

i'm sorry, i just feel like i'm arguing something that might be indefensible or arguing from a position of bias or privilege and i really don't want to bum people out on the depression thread so

i mean i personally prefer not-arguing to arguing but i'm not in the business of telling people to shut up
imo if you are a man and you are arguing about reproduction (at all), it's safe to figure you may be arguing from a position of privilege

i take your point and sorry.

i suppose i have thought of this line of argument before, but a lot of it really occurred to me all at once this past year when i was extremely depressed (haha like totally not like now), literally could get no help from my parents while in miserable financial/work circumstances, and---suddenly getting into a facebook argument with a very pious and self-righteous friendly acquaintance from college who as a liberal lutheran-anglican was trying to be permissive-but-profound about abortion being acceptable but some cases of abortion being evil (he was referring to selective abortion of fetuses known to have genetic disorders, and expected to have profound disabilities, presumably where parents decided on the basis of, say, 'welp that's too much of a hassle'). (i was trying to take issue with the polarization of some abortions as 'just evil', since this guy was such a constant advocate for finding the middle ground in morality, politics, etc., and not being divisive.) it was a touchy argument because the friendquaintance has family with a child with a similar problem, and he read all kinds of unintended implications off my side in it, which i was not sensitive enough to take precautions about.

but while i was having that argument, and having people say 'of course every life is valuable', and having to deny that i was saying anything like 'some people's lives are not valuable', i was really profoundly angered by what seemed like this unbridgeable disparity between being a parent of a child, and being the child. you can care as much as you want, show as much belief as you can in the value of the life of your child regardless of its quality, but it's still their life that they're living, and if you think that it is not desirable to live some lives (they're not lives anyone would choose, if they had a choice), i think you have to admit that you as a parent may come to be responsible for—cause to exist—a life that it is not desirable to live (from the inside, as it were). and that this possibility gave a reason not just for abortion, but for not having kids at all.

to me, (others') refusing even to hear that seemed like it was also just an outright denial of the loneliness of depression, which i think you could think of as just a particularly unhappy side of our each being separate people with individual lives.

I was thinking about this thread last night and remembered something my dad said which made me laugh considering the context of the discussion that happened here last week. Surprisingly and to their credit, my parents have always been very good about not asking me about kids because I think they know that things have been complicated for me. Occasionally though they will say something. The last time I visited my dad and I were talking and he point blank said, "Don't you want kids?". I answered that I did but that it wasn't the right time and that I thought that if for some reason it never happened for me I'd be pretty happy traveling and doing a lot of things I might have to sacrifice if I do have kids to which he responded, "Don't you think that's a little selfish?". The weird thing is that I don't even think he meant it in terms of selfish that i'd be depriving him of grandchildren (i don't think he particularly likes kids) but more so in terms of depriving the world of my offspring? Idk. It was weird.

When you have one or more kids your life is dragged helter-skelter toward being other-oriented to a degree that is extremely difficult to replicate through alternate means. You become their servant, teacher, nurse and protector rolled into one. Older parents have been doing this for so long that they often come to view it as the one ordained path of responsible adulthood and anything less than this total devotion to your kids is selfish. They are wrong, but it is hard to penetrate all that habitual self-abnegation to convince them they are wrong.

Very interesting and quite possible otm in terms of where he was coming from.

*possibly*

in view of what people without kids seem to be free to do—travel, enjoy themselves, pursue fulfilling projects, etc.—and in view of that amount of (like aimless says) habitual self-abnegation, which is after all a major contribution to the maintenance/propagation of the social good, people who opt out of having children probably strike other parents as kind of like cheats - not pulling throwing in their fair share in the system that the others thought everyone was required to sign up for. it's only natural that this would lead them to sanctify the sacrifice of the parent, the special knowledge about life from which the childless are excluded, the special privileges that accrue to the deserving self-sacrificers.

Yeah, I mean, my parents traveled all over the place and did a ton of awesome stuff after having me but they only had one child and a job where they only worked 7 out of 12 months so they had a lot of free time. I don't really think that having a kid did changed their life all that much in terms of those things ("travel, enjoy themselves, pursue fulfilling projects") and yet I still think he thinks that.

It's interesting that the tread has swung round to this topic. It's been on my mind quite a bit recently, and my feeling is that I can't imagine ever having children, basically because maintaining my own mental well-being is such a tricky ongoing task that I don't see myself being able to cope with providing for the entire well-being of another person as a priority above that. To some extent I worry that learning to 'cope with' my depression has come hand in hand with having to live quite a self-centred and limited kind of life.

i was struck by an anecdote, in andrew solomon's book maybe, about a woman who had been depressed for years, couldn't find any equilibrium, couldn't decisively improve things, and when she determined how much of it was connected to her romantic relationships, job aspirations, etc., she just started removing those things from her life, and found that the resulting life was much more manageable, even if more limited.