Are there people in your life where you just think ‘ I can’t wait until you’re a parent and finally get it and rub that smug look off your face ‘?

[doyuever]

This is a bit tongue in cheek and I know I’m evil. But DH has younger siblings and they just get on our nerves SO much. They just DON’T get it and have NO idea how hard it is to be a parent.

granted, neither did we. My DH was such an unsympathetic dick when my older sister had kids. She had her first and then two years later, she was blessed with twins. It was an absolute fucking nightmare.

a beautiful blessing, but very very very difficult time for her and her husband. I used to give a lot of moral support and try my absolute best to be there to help practically too. It was really tough and took it out of them.

my DH would say stuff like ‘ they’re not the first to have kids ‘ and ‘ they’re too dramatic and not the only people to have problems. They’re not the centre of the universe ‘.. he just didn’t get it at all.

now we are parents with small kids, he kicks himself for being such a dick and says how wrong he was.

now we have his siblings coming to see us a fair bit and they just don’t get it at all. Obviously. They try to give absolutely rubbish ‘ advice ‘ sometimes. They try to visit at 5-6pm sometimes and we’ve had to try to explain why that’s just not good right now. When we do talk about things being hard or we seem frazzled, they never have the emotional intelligence to say anything kind. ( we don’t generally say anything anymore about it being hard going as it’s just pointless ).

SIL just thinks it’s pretty much normal for mums to do it all. SIL was saying how when they were kids, the dad would go on overnight fishing trips with his friends almost every weekend… I said quite horrified that it must have been hard for their mum and she was like ‘ but why ? ‘… so no fucking clue what so ever!

me and DH say quite frequently that we just can’t wait until the have kids and we can finally understand each other again. ( they all want kids btw ).

can anyone relate ? It’s kind of funny but also annoying.

Hilarious as your reply got deleted 😂

Are you from the past? lol

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We did.

We owned and ran a B&B so I looked after them while I also cleaned our 2 rooms and made up beds etc.. It obviously took longer than normal with having to juggle two young children and their needs and there was lots of going backwards and forwards and multi tasking but I got it done.

My DH wasn't away all the time but would go away for weeks at a time several times a year for his job.

Other than that he worked flexible hours so he did the childcare while I cooked and served breakfasts. Then once breakfast service was over he would head off to work.

We made a bloody good team but we were always on the go. With the business and the children it was pretty full on but the kids never missed out on anything.

But they were good kids to be fair and pretty easy to raise.

@doyuever yes, pretend everything is magical, this is what we do now too.

We are the first in our friendship group to have children (we're in our 30s but no one is in a rush) and OMG the judgment. The last straw was at a lunch where our 8 month old was perfectly behaved but we got berated for not travelling the world LOL. Like actually criticised for being too rigid and scared to travel as we have only done one long haul flight with our baby so far and it was "only" to see family.

Someone actually said the words: "we're going to share parental leave to travel the world, why would you not with all this time off, it's lazy" and "Japan would be the perfect holiday for a 12 month old, it's so safe and lots to see" . I didn't even say anything because....where do you even start???

😂😂 I actually think so much less of them now, only an absolute idiot would say that

I don’t have kids because I knew I wouldn’t cope with being a mum, but when my SIL was pregnant, I asked her what she was going to do with the baby when she goes back to work (she’s a landscaper).

Her response was “the baby will just have to fit in to my life and come with me”. I nearly burst out laughing in her face when she said this. Needless to say, her son is looked after by my MIL 5 days a week and at least two Saturday nights a month.

Well he certainly shouldn’t have given it to her. But dangling it is a bit off

My boss rushed up the ranks very quickly and found herself line managing people considerably older than her in her late 20s. She took absolutely no prisoners, paid no attention to the organisation's flexible working policy and generally threw her weight around.

One day she gave a team member a very public, very loud dressing down in the middle of the open plan office. The team member in question had 2 young boys, and had come in late after attending a parents assembly, and needed to leave early at short notice because one of the boys was unwell. This is allowed under our flex policy. Before leaving, team member had arranged cover for her afternoon mtg. Went to tell Boss Girl, which triggered the dressing down, including the words "reconsider your commitment to this organisation", "letting me down" and all the usual gubbins thrown at working mothers. As it happens, the team member's husband also works for us, with the same flexibility, and they'd had a conversation about who was best placed to leave in the pm.

Anyway..... fast forward 6 or 7 years. Boss Girl has a baby. One that barely sleeps, and was sent home from nursery for sickness every week for 8 weeks. Who threw up on her on her was to a meeting.

There's also quite a lot of adult life experiences going on too, to get in the was of her "commitment to the organisation" and a lot of flexing of her work hours going on! Karma.

I'd love our BIL (DH's sister's husband) to become a dad. He married SIL about 12 years ago, when our DCs were 6 and 3. He was always trying to parent them for us and coming out with unnecessary cliches ("don't touch that, it's not a toy") even when we'd already adequately "parented". DS2 suffered from night terrors, which we knew how to deal with perfectly well. But if it happened when we were staying with him, BIL would suddenly appear, ready to sort it all out (probably by telling DS off).

However, they've chosen not to have DCs and our boys have grown into amazing young men.

There's another angle to this too. I had my kids in my 20's - but my sister and my SIL had theirs in their 40's. So, we are all similar ages (in our 50's now), but whereas I have two kids who are almost 30 (and left home), they still have children in primary school. This means that we have very different lifestyles. DH and I enjoy adult only holidays, and lots of free time, and it's obvious that they are sometimes jealous. I feel like shouting "Please remember that when I had two under 2 years old, you were clubbing every weekend and doing adult only holidays!"

I do recall as well, one time, my sister making me feel like a lightweight for going home at 4am after a party, but I had to get up the next day at 7am, so I got about 2 hours sleep that night! Guess what, she lay in until 4pm. Grr.

Yes this is the bit I don’t get. I always assumed giving birth and having small children wouid be like a tour of ‘nam, and anything better than that would be a result (I didn’t have any in the end). I’m fascinated by people who somehow don’t understand that before they have them. None of which answers your question OP, and your relatives do sound v annoying.

A former colleague blanked me after I returned from maternity leave and declared very loudly that she hated kids. Fair enough, I avoided her where possible and never spoke about my kids in her vicinity.

Fast forward 2 years and she got pregnant, well you'd think she was the 1st woman on earth to have got pregnant. She declared her pregnancy after our team meeting & we were so stunned we didn't say anything immediately. Tbf she wasn't the maternal type so we didn't think she'd have any.

After she returned from maternity leave, all she did was talk about her baby and in the end somebody told her a few home truths. She was shocked because she thought we'd forgotten all about it and wasn't at all apologetic about her previous nasty behaviour.

Some people are just arseholes with or without children.

Surely it’s more that mums used to be more resilient, @paranoiaofpufflings - exactly because the dads were swanning off on fishing trips! It certainly wasn’t equitable, and the mums weren’t getting the same sort of responsibility-free trips.

The mums coped because they had to. They didn’t have the option of opting out of the childcare.

Tbh at this point, given the way it's evolved the site should probably be renamed to "chatnet" or something.

It's a general talking corner of the internet and has changed beyond its original identity.

Yes I’m from the past. Hilarious.

Its still called ‘Mumsnet’ the clue is in the name. I don’t know why anyone who isn’t a mum would gravitate here, no matter what sub forums it has. I wouldn’t join ‘Snake-owners-net’ just because it’s got a women’s chat sub forum.

I remember an article from a magazine many years ago, along the lines of "So, you're pregnant! Congratulations! Now's you last chance to go round to the homes of your friends who have children and tell them all the things they're doing wrong!".

There was also a list of handy tips for planning to be parents. I remember one was "To practice dressing your 3 year old to go out, buy an octopus and a string bag. Do not leave the house until the octopus is completely enclosed in the string bag, with nothing protruding. Planning to have more than one child? Then get multiple octopuses and multiple string bags."

I’d be biting my lip to stop myself saying “Ahh yes, Enid - it is so easy to be a parenting expert when one has absolutely zero parenting experience!”

This is what I wish I had said to my sister, when she was sharing her parenting advice - second hand from observing her friends’ parenting styles, as she and BIL were determined not to have children. But back then, I was less confident and more of a people pleaser, so I held my tongue.

We kind of had the absolute opposite actually, BIL and SIL constantly used the "you don't have kids so you wouldn't possibly understand why we can't do [whatever]" but now we have a young child and they have an independent team I still don't understand what the problem was and they still seem unable to bend even slightly to accommodate other people such as, you know, their nephew. And they did an incredible line in organizing really inappropriate events when our son was really small (afternoon tea at a fancy hotel with an easily bored 2 year old, anyone?) after years of going on about us not understanding parenthood 😂

The absolute best is when people equate having children to like having animals

It's really not

I wonder if this is my relative...!!

I love the octopus and string bag thing

Bit like when DS was born, my brother said to me, oh have you been practicing dressing him by putting him in loads of different outfits

No, I've been dressing him

Out of curiosity, what benefit do you find from MN? It doesn't seem the place for someone who believes parents are resentful of others who have made different choices?

Yes my dd! Quick enough to question my parenting but I can’t wait till she gets it all back from her own!

Before I had kids I would muse (out loud to other people unfortunately) about doing a masters degree on my mat leave LOL

Teens are extremely demanding, 'independence' very rarely IS.

Well I joined when I was starting TTC and then when I was having IVF on the infertility boards etc. Obviously I didn’t just stick to those as there’s lots of topics. Are only mums allowed on AIBU or chat? Obviously I don’t regularly post on topics like the doghouse because I don’t have a dog (to be fair I often read them as I would consider a dog in the future I like looking at cute dogs). But I don’t see that AIBU or chat or TV or elderly parents should only be for mums? I am now too old to have a child after all my IVF failed. So I will never be a parent. Even though I’ve been on this site for years should I have deregistered the day I got my final negative pregnancy test?