posted
Just called vee auld girl, kno' wot i mean. Faaaam'ly innit. Told her I hadn't sent a card and she said not to worry, the best mother's day cards are homemade by the kid. Said I'd see what I can do next year.
So, what do you do for mother's day? Is it a complete load of patronising sexist bollocks? Does a box of chocolates compensate for a year of slaving over the dishwasher and grappling with ready-cooked meal packaging?
A lot of people, I say a lot of people, really go for it with the flowers and the meal out. Pubs and restaurants round here are booked up months in advanced. Is that just by families that get together anyway, any excuse, or is it some sort of major guilt trip by the grown-up "children"?
Never got into it myself more than a quick phone call, and Mrs Dang doesn't even bother phoning her mum, and she doesn't want any of that breakfast in bed nonsense from our kids either. Well, not on one specified day anyway. But I'd be interested to know if people here do have some sort of Mothering Sunday tradition and what it means to them and all that.
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posted
Also, sorry to interrupt such a vibrant conversation, but talking about mums, what about this malarky?
The working age population of Europe is shrinking. What's putting people off having children then? The article suggests "financial concerns and worries about their position at work prevent [women] from having as many children as they might like", but is there also the general worry of bringing a child into the mess we're all in at the moment?
Is anyone here put off having children for reasons like that (financial, career, doomed planet) or is it simply that you don't fancy it anyway, or just hadn't even thought about it really?
Maybe mother's day will be a quaint old tradition in the future as clones slave from age 10 to 80 and wonder what a mother is anyway while buying Mad Professor Sunday cards from Clintons.
posted
Gah. As you all know I'm right ancient, but I don't know one woman who has put off the joys of motherhood for the sake of getting a seat on the board, or upping her company car to a Lexus, or even just because her career was going well. In every single case of late motherhood, or late desire for motherhood, it has been a case of not meeting the right, or indeed any, man. Or anyone that would have sex with them without 12 condoms and a signed affidavit that they wouldn't come after them for maintenance.
it makes me MAD that all the blame for dwindling birth rate, and the inevitable collapse of civilisation is laid at the door of 'selfish' women denying their biology, when in my experience it's the men, without the biological clocks, who are the reluctant parents.
I'd like kids. I'd make a good husband and father, yeah. But probably only one or two. So I could still afford holidays and gadgets and shit like that. The daughter will be called Tilly, the boy Egon. They will be burnt as witches, come the revolution. Did you know Russia's population is gonna drop 20 million over the next couple of decades? Men only live to like 36 there now. Something like that. A bleeding bear dragging itself across the Siberian tundra told me.
This weekend I failed to visit my mother. I feel bad. Far too hungover. Blame Benway. Watched lots of TV (loving Everybody Hates Chris, reruns of Spooks and House). Browsed gossip sites and Stormfront:
quote:emo scene is so jewish, they even where zog issue thick black frame liberal glass's
lol
My poor Mum. Didn't even send her a card. I suck. Hope everyone did better.
H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
posted
Re your first post, we tend to do the standard present/card thing for my mum. This year both brother and myself were away on hols till Saturday so I ordered some flowers and sent a card before we disappeared the week earlier, then called for a chat yesterday.
Re your second post, I suspect that I won't ever have kids of my own. It's not something that I've ever regarded as either inevitable nor something that I've particularly looked for, and I'm now at the point where my presumption is that it's probably not going to happen.
I'm not very clucky and I'm fairly woolly greeny liberal so I can see lots of arguments for not adding more people to the planet. I'm fairly intelligent and might selfishly like to perpetuate my genes from that point, but physically I'm nothing special and in fact there are various medical problems that run in the family (heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, gastric problems) that again would give me pause from that point of view.
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posted
I phoned my mum in Las Vegas, wished her a happy Mothers Day. Mrs Mask got some nice cards made by the Masketeers and she bought herself a very expensive handbag and told me it was from me, to her, for Mothers Day.
posted
We took my girlfriend's mum to see Newcastle play Charlton at the Valley. She's a Geordie. They lost 3-1. We all had a big argument about trains and then weddings. It wasn't very good.
I chipped in to have my mum's old cine films transferred to DVD. I was expecting the jumpy images of her wedding and early motherhood to trigger off a sudden awareness of her mortality and cause her to burst into terrified, panicked tears, but she seemed quite pleased on the phone.
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H1ppychick
We all prisoners, chickee-baby. We all locked in.
posted
(vikram/everyone UK - change your profile to +6 hours, not +5. that way the time will be BST)
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I spent 70% of the weekend in the car, visiting mothers various. Mine we treated by descending on her, en masse - four grown-ups and two babies, eating all her food then leaving her with ill dad. We did the same for R's mum.
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posted
Won't his wife wonder where Ill Dad has got to after a while?
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Louche
Carved TMO on her clit just to make you feel bad
posted
Mother brought her small dog to visit me and was rewarded with the DVD of Pride and Prejudice and me providing my unique exhaust a puppy service. This involved launching said puppy down the wood floor repeatedly. Fun for all the family.
quote:Originally posted by dang65: The article suggests "financial concerns and worries about their position at work prevent [women] from having as many children as they might like", but is there also the general worry of bringing a child into the mess we're all in at the moment?
I don't think it's financial concerns and caraeer concerns. Women who wants kids and who are in a position to have them tend to just do so. Whenever I read this kind of thing, where the authors come up with reasons why more women aren't having kids I think there's a queasy reluctance to admit that an increasing number of women aren't spawning simply because they don't actually want to.
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quote:Originally posted by Louche: I think there's a queasy reluctance to admit that an increasing number of women aren't spawning simply because they don't actually want to.
I wonder if the Have Your Say crew will mention that. I guess this is an interesting side-effect of equality then, that women can do what men do (uh, go to work, go to pub) but men physically cannot do what women can do (have babies, clean house to anything above pitifully poor standard).
Have we tampered with nature one too many times?Posts: 8467
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I went round to see my Mum and presented her with an addition to her collection of avian objet, which she seemed pleased with.
I’m not convinced by this notion that men don’t want to have kids. I have been put off by my utterly pathetic financial/career position and by the fact that I haven’t met the right woman yet, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to have kids.
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It's the yet that's the problem. Women are guilty of it too, thinking we'll do it one day, but men can keep on procrastinating until they're 60 and still potentially father spawn.
It does seem, though, that many of the 'not yet' brigade of men in fact embrace fatherhood if a happy 'accident' does occur.
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I lost my temper with my parents due to yesterday, which made me feel a bit bad. But. I leave work on Friday, turn my phone on: beepity beep- wahey, it must be a text from a sexxy man! No (and no more, it seems), it's from my dad, saying "I hope a card will arrive for your mum tomorrow." This is not dignified with a response. Arrive home Friday evening after a rubbish week, and the phone rings, with mother saying half jokingly, half threateningly well I hope my card will be here tomorrow!!!. This infuriates me to the point of shouting at her, unfortunately. I have never, NEVER forgotten Mothers Day or family birthdays since I was old enough to buy my own cards. I. Do. Not. Need. Reminding. This is before we've even got to the point that they seem to be under the impression that the receipt of an obligatory bit of card on a date specified by Clintons and sponsored by Interflora is the ONLY possible measure of a child's love for their parent. Because obviously if the Royal Mail fucked up and lost the card (massively unlikely) this would mean that I not only don't love or care about my mother, but that I actively despise her and am the worst child in the world- actually worse than those who defraud their parents' credit cards, crash their dad's car whilst driving without permission and become axe murderers.
Anyway, I think they got the message. And guess what, the card and thoughtfully chosen book arrived on Saturday, and the carefully selected bouquet (not a boring spray of peach carnations from the dull Mothers Day specials) arrived on the Sunday. Gah.
Re: selfish women not spawning to provide the country with cheap labour. I've never liked babies or small children and definitely will never have any, but know that this is considered "unusual" (and other less polite terms). There's other, more interesting things you can do with your life, you know.
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posted
We've always been stingy and lazy. Just cards for Mother's Day. Possibly a visit if it was convenient anyway. Presents? Restaurants? What is this extravagance?
quote:Is anyone here put off having children for reasons like that (financial, career, doomed planet) or is it simply that you don't fancy it anyway, or just hadn't even thought about it really?
My main reason has always been health - my own and that of the hypothetical sprogling (genetics and suchlike).
Other arguments may be wheeled in as support:
not having a cash-cow of a career that would enable me to keep the brat in the style to which I was accustomed when I were a youngster. (I can only imagine being a lone parent, as my mother and her sisters were. For them, that was in a respectable middle-class, divorced way, you understand. Not six kids by different dads, "when's the giro due, again?" stuff.)
and yep, doomed planet, too many people and all that jazz.
also government policies that make it sound as if a child is some sort of heavily-regulated state franchise.
Though I still don't know for certain that I'd "get rid of it" were I ever to find myself with the up-the-duff dilemma.
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My Mum is on safari so didn't do any mother's day stuff this year, but her birthday is a week before mother's day so we usually do something like go for a meal when we're all around.
As for the children issue, it's a tough one and a combination of many things. Like herbs says, I don't personally know any woman who has put off having children due to their career. It is hard to find men who say they want children as you get older, although perhaps that's also tied up with the not finding the 'right' one. But there is this issue of the female 'reproductive window'. Our eggs do have use by dates on them so there is a certain pressure once you get into your thirties. Then there are of course the financial concerns and the overloaded planet to think of.
Personally I'm not sure about children, some days I want them some days I don't. It all seems like something that I might like to do in the future, while I'm aware that I will need to make a concious decision one way or the other over the next few years otherwise I'll be one of these women who finds herself unintentionally childless. Of course you can adopt, but I'm talking biological children here. If I'm not going to have children then I want it to be because I made that decision (unless of course there is some health reason that I don't know of yet) and not just because I 'didn't get round to it'.
For me its not just about having children though, it's about the whole having a family, e.g. a husband and a child or two. If my desire to have a child outweighs my desire to be part of a family unit then I could go it alone with some sperm and a turkey baster, but for now if I do it I want to do it with someone I love and am committed too. If I don't find anyone then I'll just run my farm on my own, fool around with the hunky farm boys in the hay stacks and adopt loads of kids to help muck out the cows and pick all the fruit and veg. I might start saving to freeze my eggs though, just to keep my options open.
posted
I phoned mine despite the fact that I don't like her, it's easier to be nice to her than to make the rest of the family suffer her moaning about me. For once (and probably just because I phoned before lunchtime) she was sober and didn't say anything too mean.
I had a quick word with my younger brother who is treatning to come and visit over the Easter holidays and that was Monsters day over for me.
It's not even Mothers Day in Holland until the 2nd Sunday in May..
So far as being ready for kids I didn't think it was a hard decision to make, I guess I've always wanted kids and the question of when really wasn't an issue.
I can't stand the fact that I lost Summer when I got divorced and that's hard. Sometime I wish I hadn't had her because I get so upset that she's not around and it would be easier if she wasn't, I just hope that pain lessens as she and I get older.
-------------------- my own brother a god dam shit sucking vampire!!! you wait till mum finds out buddy!
posted
As my own mum is dead, we concentrated our efforts on having a nice day with J's mum instead. Cards and thoughtfully chosen presents, all going out together for a 'family day out' followed by the obligatory meal. To be honest, it was the kind of day that we have fairly regularly but it means a lot to J's mum when we spend Mother's Day together as a family. Rather than thinking of it as a sheep like response to Hallmark cards induced consumer pressure, I treat it as an opportunity to do something good for someone who means a lot to me, knowing that it will mean a lot to them.
As for the To Spawn Or Not To Spawn debate, all I can say is that I have always wanted to have another child; now more than ever as time is getting on and my eggs are turning Down's. Sadly, J does not feel the same way and resolutely refuses to knock me up, giving finance based reasons.
[ 27.03.2006, 05:48: Message edited by: Sidney ]
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There's a lot of references to finances playing a huge part in their decision to have children. Perhaps some of the family unit posters could highlight the impact of children on their finances. I was raised on pittance see and I personally only really felt it later when I didn't really have the same support as my friends in college. You know, I could deal with not having the most fashionable trainers or every Star Wars figure in the range. I'm from the school of thinking that it's completely possible to raise children on a modest wage, but I'd like to hear someones personal experience. It might also be an ideal outlet for a good moan.
I take into account it was when I got my first job and my father demanded a large chunk of my wage for rent. I think he was trying to show me the error of my ways for leaving college but all it did was drive me out of his home without any savings in the bank and it's been a bit of a hand to mouth affair since then.
posted
when i rang my mother yesterday she was honestly very breezy about the fact that neither my sistor or i had sent a card; i get the impression she thinks its all a bit of a hallmark holiday anyway. my mum knows that we love her to mini- bits, she doesnt need a V and A card with a cecil beaton photo of a woman in a big hat to prove it now. and fifteen years ago she didnt need to be confined to her bed for an extra hour whilst me and my sistor stood sentinel at her bedside forcing her to drink tea that was too milky and a boiled egg that was too runny and toast that was too burned, when she would much rather have been listening to the archers and filing her nails. in fact she has said she found the whole performance slightly unnerving, although i suppose that might be the sort of thing you only say if you secretly liked it a little bit.
i used to desperately want kids, desperately desperately, but i think that was because i was a bit broken and i thought if i had kids i could mend myself by making healthy replicas of me which i could also dress in adorable little outfits, which is of course massively dangerous and the worst possible reason to spawn. i still like the idea of having children, but unfortunately its taken me nearly 31 years to begin mending myself, im not even going to think about getting into another relationship for like, a year, and im not sure i wouldnt be a terrible mother besides. i dont want to end up like one of those poor people you see on the 'call the supernanny! our kids are fat pikeys!' programmes, wondering how on earth they adorable little bundles of joy turned into nihilistic puddles of lard who only occasionally wake up from their torpor to engage in a fifteen minute frenzy of indiscriminate biting. and its very easy to say 'well, you wouldnt, because youre not stupid', but i dont really trust myself not to turn another human being's existence into a living hell.
quote:Originally posted by New Way Of Decay: There's a lot of references to finances playing a huge part in their decision to have children. Perhaps some of the family unit posters could highlight the impact of children on their finances.
It is interesting. I don't think when women cite "financial reasons" it's solely because they want to only clothe their angels in Baby Gap and send them to private schools and give them THE BEST of everything. I think a part of it is that for women to have kids they have to resign themselves to giving up work for a minimum of 6 months or so, and after being financially independent for all/most of their working lives, it must be quite daunting. Not only must it appear more risky to be reliant on a single salary in an age when job security is weaker, for me personally to be living off someone else's money would be difficult.
Most people would want/expect their kids to go to uni now, and that is obviously now a monstrous expense to take into account.
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not...
You reached over with your hand and knocked my Jap over
posted
Not really, you get 18 years to put some money away. It's like £50 per month in some sort of savings account ISA doobrey. Sorted.
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Mother's Day here isn't until middle of May, but I usually just call (sometimes more, sometimes less). Froopy sends a card to his mom I think.
I didn't let financial concerns stop me from having a baby, but they might stop me from having more than one. I can go back to work when she is around 5, but if I have more, the time stretches (and I don't want to have another one right away, I'm still recovering from this one).
Maybe it is more that people are having fewer children than many people are choosing not to have children at all? A family of more than two children is more and more rare these days, isn't it?
ETA: Of course you can go back to work sooner if you put your kid in daycare, but that isn't cheap, and I wouldn't have had a baby if I wanted someone else to raise her.
quote:Originally posted by New Way Of Decay: There's a lot of references to finances playing a huge part in their decision to have children. Perhaps some of the family unit posters could highlight the impact of children on their finances. I was raised on pittance see and I personally only really felt it later when I didn't really have the same support as my friends in college. You know, I could deal with not having the most fashionable trainers or every Star Wars figure in the range. I'm from the school of thinking that it's completely possible to raise children on a modest wage, but I'd like to hear someones personal experience.
I'm not speaking from personal experience, but just to throw a thought in the mix - it's maybe not possible to directly compare your situation as a young'un to the current climate, given that when we were kids it was still possible to pay a mortgage on a single salary. House prices have gone up much faster than salaries (in fact - I remember dang pointing out that salaries in some sectors had gone down both in real terms, and literally over the past ten years), so when people say they can't afford it, it could well be that they're perfectly capable of buying designer clothes and electronics for their kids, the like of which our parents never could, but now can't afford the mortgage repayments on their current salary. I don't know, of course, because I've never seriously looked at my finances with regard to fitting a baby into the scheme of things, except that I do know I could still barely afford a one bedroom flat in Redhill.
Maybe it is a pressure thing as well, like people feel there kid really does need a certain quality of life that's only attainable through financial outlay. I don't think that's necessarily true - I was at a christening recently in Fulham and the hosts were clearly minted but still appeared to me to be largely passionless about their kids and treated them a little bit like further accessories to their marriage and lifestyle. No doubt those kids would grow up in affluent surroundings but I guess it's no substitute for taking an interest in kids' lives. Nonetheless, it would be difficult to face the bombardment of "your baby needs this!" style advertising, or stomach the "are you failing your children by living in a crap area?" headlines, without so much as a smidgen of self doubt, and a feeling that maybe you need to live in a better area with better schools to give your kids a chance. So you know. I don't think it's just about people wondering if they can buy the latest kit.
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