Ten Reasons I Don't Have Kids

I have a theme for this blog- the "UN- mommy" blog!
I often get asked, or more I feel an implication of people wondering why I don't have kids. It's funny that people don't ask why people DO have kids....

1) Schizophrenia - My father's sister, his only sibling, was Schizophrenic. I watched my grandmother try to take care of her and all the methods they tried to make her better until she died when I was ten. Schizophrenia has an 80% heritability rate- meaning if a parent or their exact genetic match- a sibling- has it, their child has an 80% chance of also becoming Schizophrenic.

2) Mental illness in my mother's family. I believe that my mother has some kind of Sociopathic disorder that their father also had. In combination with the Schizophrenia genes, I do not want to purposely bring a child with those risk factors into the world.

3) Retinitis Pigmentosa- a genetic disease that causes blindness- my mother has it.  My mother blamed me for all her issues, so I feel like if I had a child they would in fact have the right to blame me for their genetic disabilities- and it is an awful, terrible feeling to have someone blame you for their physical and mental illnesses.

4) Diabetes- of course this is manageable, but injecting a child with insulin would be hard for me with my squeamishness around needles.

5) Alcoholism- there is a lot of Alcoholism on both sides of my family as well as in David's family.

6) Suicidal Depression- this is no joke- imagine your child killing themselves. There is suicidal depression on both my side and David's side.

7)  My own terrible childhood- my mother was a terrible, hyper critical, hysterical clingy nut-job that did not have any concern for my safety or well being. I did not have good boundaries or realistic caring modeled for me. I am afraid I would be overprotective and too anxiety ridden to let a child grow up with any sense of security or ease in the world. Note that I do not ever let the dog go to daycare or dog-walkers.... ;-)

8) People dying young of Cancer in David's family. You watch a young person clinging to life and screaming about the dead girls he is hallucinating as he is dying and change his colostomy bag and get back to me about having a kid with cancer risk.

9) There are 8 billion people on the planet. The planet is warming at a rate of 1 degree a decade. There will be sea level rise that will impact the amount of area people can inhabit. It is not sustainable.

10) We both had horrible experiences with adopted siblings who grew up to be super takers and we are sick of feeling taken advantage of.

11) oh, I didn't even cover everything in this list- the top reason we don't want kids is yes, we are selfish and don't have time to give all our energy to a little being. That we created. Who will put 10,000's of thousands of pounds of waste into a landfill by the time it lives to be 80....

I feel like there is an awful lot of judgment around people who don't want kids. I feel like you think I am judging you for having kids. If I could have a guarantee of two beautiful happy intelligent generous spirits that embodied the best of David's and my family and would definitely not have our genetic shit storms nor pass it along to their own kids, I might do it despite my environmental convictions, so it really is about the genetic risk factors that we have that you do not. So I love your kids, I love kids, I am so happy for you if you are happy, and please invite me to all the christenings and baby showers and bat mitzphahs and birthdays and graduations and charity fundraisers, because I will cheer and donate and make cupcakes and buy presents and show up.