Yah, my high school boyfriend was well aware that his mother had been using condoms and foam, and that his parents got married mostly to get away from their parents and had never intended to have kids. And she was perfectly sanguine when she told me that, in front of him. He was massively fucked up, but that had nothing to do with why.
A lot of that is cultural. Israeli parents who had kids in the 1970s have very different attitudes about raising children from Americans almost 50 years later. But also... it's not necessarily that traumatic.
My mother told me, after my dad died, "I didn't enjoy having small children. They were sold to me wrong." It's hilarious and infuriating because it's my mother in a nutshell that she thought she should tell me that in my 30s, but it didn't fuck me up. The fact that my mother did not enjoy being responsible for small, irrational people was blatantly obvious, for all that she was a good mum.
ETA: Also, for what it's worth, everyone, including my sister, was well aware that if there'd been the kind of pre-marriage genetic counselling that Ashkenazi Jewish communities now have as a matter of course, and if she'd been conceived two years later, my parents would have terminated the pregnancy. Everyone, including my sister, was/is massively in favor of that genetic counselling and of freedom of choice. Nobody in my family was ever thick enough to equate "we would have terminated this Tay Sachs pregnancy if we'd known and if it had been legal" with "we don't love you and want you to thrive."
The LW's brother, on the other hand, is a motherfucker who needs to be dumped already.
no subject
Yah, my high school boyfriend was well aware that his mother had been using condoms and foam, and that his parents got married mostly to get away from their parents and had never intended to have kids. And she was perfectly sanguine when she told me that, in front of him. He was massively fucked up, but that had nothing to do with why.
A lot of that is cultural. Israeli parents who had kids in the 1970s have very different attitudes about raising children from Americans almost 50 years later. But also... it's not necessarily that traumatic.
My mother told me, after my dad died, "I didn't enjoy having small children. They were sold to me wrong." It's hilarious and infuriating because it's my mother in a nutshell that she thought she should tell me that in my 30s, but it didn't fuck me up. The fact that my mother did not enjoy being responsible for small, irrational people was blatantly obvious, for all that she was a good mum.
ETA: Also, for what it's worth, everyone, including my sister, was well aware that if there'd been the kind of pre-marriage genetic counselling that Ashkenazi Jewish communities now have as a matter of course, and if she'd been conceived two years later, my parents would have terminated the pregnancy. Everyone, including my sister, was/is massively in favor of that genetic counselling and of freedom of choice. Nobody in my family was ever thick enough to equate "we would have terminated this Tay Sachs pregnancy if we'd known and if it had been legal" with "we don't love you and want you to thrive."
The LW's brother, on the other hand, is a motherfucker who needs to be dumped already.