Posted this in chat, but maybe it wasn't light-hearted enough.
Sorry, this is long and complicated. Have been on here a while back, but NC as I was too identifiable previously.
All my life I've been defined by my work and my career. I've always put work first and lived a long way away from my family from the start of university. I have also struggled with depression and ASD all my life.
Putting work first (and quite possibly some of the depression) is mostly a reaction to having been very explicitly not wanted and disliked by my mother, who has always been self-defining by being the perfect mother and housewife (outwardly perfect, but obviously with lots of issues given my upbringing). My mother fairly clearly has ASD herself but isn't diagnosed, and thinks I am disgusting and a failure and subnormal, having been told of my mid-30s ASD diagnosis by my sister (whom I told in confidence and asked her not to share the info round. I don't think my sister has ASD, though other issues mean she is very like my mother).
My work contract is ending and I don't have another job to go to, and it's looking like I won't be able to get anything even close to what I've been doing for the last 20 years, where we live. So it's time to lose some of that self-definition-by-career that has been holding me together.
DH and I have had lots of discussions and decided it's now or never to try to have kids. We've been over it and over it so many times, that we're just going round in circles.
He wants kids, because he thinks it'd be great fun.
Some days I think having kids would be brilliant. I like the idea of going hiking with 10 year olds, or 18 year olds. I quite like the idea of homework and talking through understanding other people, and thinking seriously about how to mould little kids into responsible adults.
But most of the time I think I don't want kids, I'd hate the day to day drudgery of babies, I'd hate the fact DH got to go to work and have fun there whereas I would be stuck doing inane little kid stuff all the time for years, I'd be awful as a parent of small children, and that it would be terribly unfair on kids to have to put up with me with my readable ASD face and my depression and my need for time alone (and, by then, my loss of self-definition-by-career, and general huge guilt complex of not wanting to be my mother or my sister but actually having to do many of the same things that they do, while hating myself for capitulating).
DH's pretty emotionally mature, he gets on and copes with stuff and is productive and cheerful and helpful. He doesn't seem to understand how much of a struggle I have with things like intimacy and trust, and wanting to be around small children generally. He gets to be the fun uncle, sometimes, but he hasn't spent that much time around kids. He doesn't seem to notice that the only kids I can really relate to are ones with ASD, and that I find most kids way too smotheringly intimate. We've discussed this but it keeps coming back to some kind of impasse where he says he thinks it would all be fine. I've tried to ask what happens if I don't bond with a kid, what if it isn't fine - but we never really get anywhere.
Has anyone else ever felt so ambivalent when TTC ought to be fun and exciting? Does anyone who now has kids have ways of coping with this kind of worry? Does anyone have ways of coping beyond gritted teeth and a plastered-on smile if they haven't bonded with their kids?