you're crazy. J/K sorry.

As someone who has known for some years that I do not want to have children, I can offer my experience that many many people (particularly women) who DO want children appear to find my choice threatening somehow. My sister seriously called me crazy when I told her (granted we were teenagers at the time). When I told a friend/colleague that I had had a tubal ligation, she insisted, and I mean she was vehement, that it must be reversible, otherwise what would I do when I changed my mind?

I don't tell people whether or not to have children, so I don't expect others to do the same for me. But they do. Yeah, so I'll bet sometimes I get to sounding maniacal too. I don't mean to. However, given that my experience has been that when my decision is questioned I'm usually being set up for some sort of quasi-proof that I really do want children OR that there's something wrong with me for not wanting them, it wouldn't be surprising for me to be kind of defensive.

While I didn't read the article you refer to, I would also hypothesize the following. First, if the article is about people who choose not to have children, they are certainly going to be asked to "defend" their position, or at least explain it, just so that the readership can understand where they're coming from. That alone could produce an article in which such people sound defensive. Secondly, you're only hearing about a small portion of their personality by reading that article, just one decision that they've made in a lifetime of decisionmaking. But the article would not be able to really put the decision in context, because the article is ABOUT that decision. See what I'm getting at? So they could appear maniacal or obsessed, but that might be a product of being asked to address a particular issue. Finally, ask yourself where the article appeared. If it appeared in a magazine that has a usual readership of people who have or want children, there may be a negative slant. Even if unintended. At the very least, the article by its existence is saying, "This is an unusual position -- let's explore its justification" which alone is distancing.

I often wonder why it is that we so often find people different from us to be threatening. Why we feel the need to make them wrong, or sick, or mistaken or some such, as though that would make us and our decisions right. Or as if there isn't room in this world for different people to have different feelings and ideas about things. There doesn't have to be one right way about anything.

On the college education, etc., for cats -- I was being somewhat facetious in an attempt to draw a bright line distinction between the affection that I feel for my furry felines and that which most parents feel for their children. Be advised that I sometimes think I'm funny and other people haven't got a clue that I'm making a joke. In addition, I hold other people's children in a completely different light than I do my own animal companions. I don't want to raise their children; they don't want to raise my cats. But I acknowledge their children as small sized human beings and I acknowledge my cats as regular sized animals. That is going to produce all kinds of differences.

So what about people who have both children and animal companions?

Thanks for offering me an opportunity to clarify. Understanding is only achieved through dialogue.

Peace.

~ ~ ~
All meetings end in separation
All acquisition ends in dispersion
All life ends in death
- The Buddha

|\_/|
='_'=

Every hundred years, all new people