Hey, it's my blog and it's more personal than what's on the forum itself. If you can't handle that, proceed with caution. If you don't like my blog, then don't read it.

hot off the heels of slogging through old pictures of the home my ex and I had, there's a thread about kids around here.

Yesterday I went through an old archive that contained family pictures from my first marriage. There are perhaps 200 photos, and sadly the disc they had been on got corrupted. Saving the photos meant checking each one and adding the proper file names to them.

I have a lot of good memories from my first marriage. Sometimes, though, it is too much when I go back through them and I realize that in the end everything was shattered. I finished restoring the photos.

I'd rather that the family didn't split up. Aside from that, what I posted in the general forum is honesty. Would I be better off lying to her and saying I knew exactly what I was doing when she was concieved? Or do I tell her the truth saying I love her to death even though a lot of stuff went on that I would rather not have gone through?

My reasons for being fixed are not related to anything my child has done--it's related to the pure **** my ex wife put me through before conception. If I'd known what would happen throughout 1999 and 2000, I'd have got fixed before I ever got married. Every single day my ex pushed having kids. every single day. OK, it was probably once a week, maybe twice or three times, but it was a subject that came up way too many times. I got sick of it, and let her know, gently at first. After about a year I had enough and said this: "If you bring up children one more time before we get home, I'm going in tomorrow and set up my vasectomy." In the end, this is the reason I decided for the surgery anyway. Should I feel guilty about all the brothers or sisters my daughter doesn't have? No more than anyone else who's decided to stop at one kid.

Perhaps she might have been born to parents that had a solid marriage. I'm not saying I'd not want to have her around, I'm just wondering out loud how much harder on her it is now that her parents are split. There's not one thing I can think of in regards to a child that's worse than bringing them into an unstable family. If you're not stable--if there's any doubt whatsoever about your marriage (or if you aren't married to begin with), you have no business having a child at all. If that ruffles anyone's feathers, I frankly don't care because it is what I see as the truth. Think of it, would you rather have been born to a family full of fighting without a stable home, or did you take for granted the fact you had Mommy and Daddy both to raise you? That's where I goofed yet again in regards to that marriage, and my little girl gets to pay the price of it. I'm seeing it go on again with another family member--only this time it is worse.

I was raised without Mom. And you know, I kinda resent her a little for not taking better care of herself in hopes she'd still be alive to raise us kids. Instead my grandmother halfway attempted to fill in for Mom, and the results were not pretty. There was physical and verbal abuse, along with a good dose of hatred that it took me years to forgive. Honestly, I wish Mom could have seen this before she died.

I love my daughter, don't get me wrong, but I so wish that she had a better chance with a good family instead of being born to two people who just could not make marriage work. I wish she'd never had to endure the fights that were so loud that they could be heard three doors down. I wish she'd never been trapped with two adults who were at each others' throats, and she was screaming so loud because of it that her voice finally faded out.

Ideally, that means being born to parents who will not split. Not so ideally, hopefully she will forget the hardest parts of her childhood. Even less ideally, well, I question whether the average person is emotionally capable of hearing any other options. Let me ask, though, would you rather one, not conceive a child at all, or two, go ahead and conceive knowing that said child will go through **** for the first (insert amount of time) of their life?

One thing I just do not understand is this:

Any time there is any hint whatsoever that a person does not want a child to be alive, people get their panties in a bunch and literally scream that the person should not say such things, or they say the person does not really love their child. It doesn't seem to matter if the person who said anything really means they want their child gone, or if what they meant couldn't be any further from having a child gone.

Now go up to "I love my daughter, don't get me wrong..." and read that paragraph again. There is not one single part that says anything about not loving my child or not wanting her to be alive. NOT ONE. Don't go thinking that "it sounds like" or "it might mean" anything. It's black and white, it's very clear, and it means exactly what it says, no more and no less.

I grow tired of hearing people say "what if your child hears that" or "that's not something a person who loves their child would say." Maybe I'm just different. What I will tell you is that "If I had it to do over again, I would never have kids" does NOT mean "I don't love my child."

I'm not sure what's in this post can really describe what I went through back then or how I feel about it now. I guess I have to make the comparison to having a friendly chat here about something to having one about the same thing in real life, and remind myself that the disagreements here are no different than those in real life.