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Tuesday, January 15, 2008
I don't understand women.
That's not a news flash.
Men and women have forever struggled in vain to figure out one another.
What, in particular, I don't understand about women is that virtually all of the ones I've met recently are hellbent to have a child if they've yet to have one. I just don't get the Kid Thing.
It's headspinning when every woman you talk to from age 30 to 50-plus seems obsessed with the notion of bearing a child.
I don't dislike kids. A lot of friends' kids I know are fun. I've just never seen the need to have one of my own.
I'm not egotistical enough to absolutely need a Mini-Me.
Do I want to spend the next two decades being responsible for properly raising a kid, or would I rather be free to move someplace warm in a few years, lie on a beach and do anything I want anytime I want?
Hmmm. Tough choice.
Why do so many childless women of all ages dream of raising a rug rat?
Sure, their biological clocks are ticking and many feel pressure to bear a squawling offspring while they still can.
"It's just their maternal instinct," said a pal. "You can't control instinct."
I don't buy it.
For ages, men have had an instinct to hunt and gather but most no longer do so.
Otherwise, I'd be sharpening a crude weapon and spearing my neighbour's Shih Tzu in an instinctive quest to hunt down a meal.
I think many women who yearn to have an ankle-biter can be a little naive - especially those who want to do so whether or not they're in a relationship.
Hollywood has romanticized the notion of having kids in or out of wedlock at later and later ages and made most women believe they should all have a child because it's just their nature to do so.
Some women I know who obsess about having their first child with a special guy don't even consider that, in the event of a split-up, they might wind up raising the kid alone.
Kids are hard enough to raise for two parents.
Many people don't think hard enough about something as life-changing as having children.
Some women I've met who are hellbent on kids can barely take care of themselves. Kids would be a huge wakeup call.
A younger girl I know talked endlessly of wanting children. I suggested she volunteer babysitting at a charity's halfway house.
Kids, she found out, were a lot more work than she thought. She didn't volunteer for long.
So why do women have a burning desire for kids? As a man, I might never figure it out.
Author Rabbi Shmuley Boteach noted even Sigmund Freud couldn't understand women and their desires - and most men can't either.
"There seems to be a unique male blindness," the relationship guru wrote. "Husbands today seem incapable of truly making their wives happy and many women now look to ... children to fill the void ..."
Psychologist Dr. Paul Sussman says it's dangerous to think a child will fill an emptiness - especially for career women who feel they're missing out on something.
"Having children is marketed to us by corporations as being the one thing that can fulfil you," said Sussman. "But if you think your world is imperfect, you have to turn inward and figure yourself out first."
That is truly great advice.
E-mail kerry.diotte@sunmedia.ca or view his blog at: blog.canoe.ca/diotte
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