#147: Who’s allowed to want kids?

Maybe that was part of the problem for me: all that trying in the trying forums. The desperation radiated off their questions (“My joints hurt, could that be a sign?”). So far, in my life, effortlessness held far greater appeal—in dressing, in poise, in making a baby. To appear effortless meant to never outwardly cop to a condition of lack. And yet

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There’s a reason I associated the forums with conservative types. It’s not particularly popular (or easy) to frame parenthood as aspirational when you hold the concerns of the left. At least not in my world. Sure, you can have kids as a leftist, but the primary conversations surrounding parenthood that I participated in concerned its problems: the

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