Our more conservative friends' reactions are unsurprising, but the gushing from our left & liberal friends concerns me. Why is this STILL an exception instead of the rule?

I have no solutions, but merely observations. Wiser heads than mine will hopefully figure this out.

11/11 fin.

I guess the point of this is that heteronormative pairings "inevitably" leading to children, with the female partner bearing the bulk of the responsibility and sacrifice, is so deeply entrenched in our society that you can't escape it.

10/?

One: effusive praise for how great it is that my husband would prioritise me in this way. The other: something between shock and discomfort that I would allow him to make that "sacrifice".

9/?

So the reason I tell you this long-winded anecdote as a thread of the quoted tweet above is that whenever I give the abridged version of this story in response to "so do you plan on having kids?" I will get one of two responses.

8/?

Him: "So if I'm not willing to make career sacrifices for kids, and I'm not comfortable asking you to make them, and we don't actually seem to *want* kids anyway... I guess we're officially child-free?"
Me: "yeah, I guess so"

7/?

He then went on to say that he loved his work too much to want to sacrifice career goals for parenting duties, and that he could see I was probably going to be in the same boat in a few years, and that it would be wrong of him to expect me to make a sacrifice that he wasn't keen on sharing.

6/?

And then, to my great surprise and relief, he said: "we* don't seem to actually want to have children, do we?"

Let me tell you, that "we" did a lot of heavy lifting for my emotional well-being.

5/?

I'd deeply internalised the heteronormative parenting schtick so I assumed I would have kids; that's what you do when you've spent your entire adult life in a conservative Evangelical environment. We were married in that framework, and I had just realised that I did not want it.

4/?

He broached the topic: told me we'd been married for quite some time, and we'd always seemed to find reasons for putting off having kids. At that point it crystallised for me that I wasn't neutral on the topic: I actually wanted to be child-free. And my stomach lurched.

3/?

When we'd been married about fifteen years, on a summer afternoon, we were chatting on our deck with beers after a family dinner. As usual, we'd been fielding the "when were you thinking about starting a family?" question. It came up a lot. 2/?

Found the original pencil drawing I used for my vector: as you can see, there's a strong resemblance to the MERL's absolute unit ram 😂

It's kind of the same thing: I get my students to figure out how to structure or express ideas by talking them through to a voice memo or voice to text - it's surprisingly useful, and when you listen/read back you pick up on a lot of things you'd otherwise miss.