In my latest Ask Mia video when I encouraged you to ‘ask me anything!’, some people took me quite literally and asked me very personal questions about THEIR OWN lives. While I would love to flatter myself and agree that indeed, I have all the answers, I apparently don’t (who knew?).
So I pulled a few of those questions out to share with the wider MM community, secure in the knowledge that you could provide some collective wisdom.
Sonia* writes:
My husband wants to get a vasectomy. He is so adamant that he is getting one that he is booked in to see a Urologist early March so it has come too quick for me.He is 38 and I am only just 30 and I have 3 kids. The youngest has just turned one. I really don’t want him to cut all babies off forever – so to speak. And I am completely torn between – do I settle that three children is enough? Or is my longing for another just due to hormones and totally impractical? I realise that my children are my life as I didn’t focus on a big career when I was young as I did the marriage thing early and babies started when I was 22. Now all my friends have caught up and are starting families I feel massive pangs that I will never get to have another baby ever again. My husband wanted me to get a hysterectomy and I refused, so now everything is “Well I’m doing this vasectomy for you!” I didn’t want him to get one in the first place and I know he would possibly leave if I got pregnant again – that is how adamant he is about the no baby situation.
I have no idea what to do and I just cry when I think that he is ending that chapter before I am ready. I am worried too that no babies in my life will make me jealous of all my mates who have started to have them. I know I have 3 already and I am probably greedy – I had trouble conceiving the first two and the third was a natural. It worries me that I will hold a grudge against him for life and I won’t be able to move on.
Does everyone have this problem? And do you know if you have had enough babies? Or is the biological urge just so strong that I am being irrational?
A little while ago I wrote about the new trend for younger men to have ‘preventative vasectomies’ and that blew my mind a little bit. These are guys in their 20s and 30s who are so scared of being ‘trapped’ by a woman into having a baby that they’re cutting off supply…..
Paranoid and cynical, yes sireeee.
As with most modern trends, this one appears connected with a
celebrity. In 2006, American football player, Tom Brady, broke up with
his girlfriend, actress Bridget Moynahan. Soon after, she announced she
was pregnant with his child and he announced he was dating supermodel
Giselle Bundchen. An obscenely good looking mess ensued, played out in
the tabloids. Natch.Some cynical blokes perceived this situation as an example of ‘man trapping’ – girl meets boy, girl ‘tricks’ boy into getting her pregnant, girl extracts 18 years worth of child support out of boy. But according to US men’s mag, Details, man trapping is now called ‘Ooopsing’. As in ‘Ooops! That must have been a Tic Tac I swallowed, not my birth control pill!”
I’m sure this does occasionally happen but often? Often enough to make you so suspicious of women that you’ll willingly have surgery on your testicles? Some snip-happy men say yes.
“Now I can never have a girl say I made her pregnant,” 23-year-old college student Marcus Whitlock bragged to Details after pretending to a doctor he was 30, forking over US$850 and limping happily away after a 15-minute vasectomy. ”I don’t have to worry about being tricked.”
The magazine also unearthed Tim Vass, “a 34-year-old technical writer in Florida, [who] got snipped in May 2007 after a half-dozen pregnancy scares, including what he says were two attempted oopsings. Both of the latter were one-night stands; he says one woman admitted she didn’t know who the father was and the other demanded a DNA test that proved her wrong.” Now that the safety of his sperm has been secured, Tim reckons sex is “like eating junk food and knowing you’re not going to get fat.”Excuse me gentlemen but have you heard of condoms? Less expensive. Less painful. Less permanent. Less risk of contracting an STD. Oh wait, too late. You’re already neutered. Ooops.
Or should it be the woman’s choice because she bears the physical brunt of it? Any of these issues familiar? Have you resolved them?
But the problem Sonia describes is very different. What when you and your partner are on very different pages when it comes time to calling ‘time’ on your procreating years? I’ve discovered that it’s pretty rare for couples to be totally in sync but that the partner who says ENOUGH usually wins.
Top Comments
Can I just say how lucky Sonia is that she even has one?
I wish so much that my husband followed through on my (and his apparantely) desire to have children.
9 years of backing out and this year I just snapped and said no children. Ever. I even considered having tubal ligation but friends have talked me out of it. I'll get an IUD. It's not like I am having much sex anyway.
I can't take this yes, no, maybe thing anymore. I got married young - at 24 - and made it clear before hand that I'd love to have a family. He agreed. But the excuses I've heard over the years.....
So please appreciate what you have. I can understand the desire to have children - I was there too for the longest time. But not everyone gets what they want out of life.
As a woman and a feminist, I have to admit that I do find it perplexing that many of the same people who are all, "a woman's body is her choice" think they have a right to pass comment/judgement when men want to make this choice with *their* own bodies. As I said I am very much a feminist but this smacks of double standard to me. I don't necessarily mean to respondents to this article, it's an attitude/discrepancy I've observed many times.