3048: God Made Me w/ Calvin Cato
 

Captain Marvel, Green Book, and speed dating; God’s plan for you; Chick-fil-A’s anti-LGBTQ donations

Guest:
Calvin Cato
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This has been exactly my experience too though. Parents will complain about their hellscape of a life and then ask when I'm having kids. I always want to say, "Well, you just talked me out of it."

Keep in mind that raising kids in the US is much more difficult and stressful here than where you are in Europe. Terrible schools, violence, unaffordable child care, very expensive health insurance, the list goes on and on.

I really think you take these comments way too personally. In this instance, she was clearly speaking about a very specific type of parent - the ones who insist to childfree people that they need to have kids, who keep pushing that line even after being told by the childfree person that they are very happy with their decision, and who make this exaggerated show of how they're doing the most important job in the world by having a kid. It's a very specific type of person. If that's not you, then she isn't talking about you.

These comments were made during a conversation about how people have these ingrained ideas about what "the perfect family" is, and how people who don't conform to that face moral outrage over it.

People love to bitch about their lives though. Doesn't mean they actually dislike what's going on. Like, I bitch about my job all the time. Truth is I love my new job and I just need to vent my frustrations about the difficulty.

At the same time, some people do react to the extreme. There are 16 year Olds that are like "oh my god my grandma made a comment about assuming I'll have kids one day. Look at this breeder culture".

A coworker the other day asked me if I have kids "yet" and then gave me a recommendation about child wellbeing based on something she was experiencing presently. A part of me is like "that's sure an assumption" but then the other part of me was like "no she isn't meaning anything bad by it. She's just trying to connect with me and share her experiences with me as a way of showing she cares"

That's certainly true, and people who sneer "breeder" at people or refer to "shitting babies" are disgusting. Chemda doesn't do that.

Edit: I'm 42, and got married at 41. I'm lucky that my mom has always been the type that just wanted me to be happy, and my brother gave her grandchildren, so she accepted my decision to not have kids years ago and doesn't push. My husband's mother, on the other hand, brings it up every time I see her. We continue to smile and be polite, but at a certain point, when someone has told you 100 times that they've talked it over and decided that they don't want college kids at age 60, it's time to drop it.

Except nobody goes to a job they hate for 30 years so their dog can have health insurance and an education.

Oh no i meant that as a testiment to children being more than dogs. Not that all parents are miserable.

I would bankrupt myself to pay for medical care for my kid. I would do anything to keep my kid alive with a good quality of life. If my dog needed extensive surgery to maybe have a shot at a couple more years? Nah, palliative care it is. That's not to say I won't spend any money on pets. But it's a different scope from humans before you're like "alright let's throw in the towel"

Did we just learn kids are different than dogs?