Aspies For Freedom

yes & no at the same time.

Rough as bloody guts for us, but we can't exactly "opt out".

In the now of life,

there is that quality of,

"without our kid, imagine how shallow/mundane our lives would be without him"...

but the amout of energy it takes out of us....

again, very questionable.

It's exhausting, we have moments of feeling depleted (utterly) but at the same time, there's also the other side of the coin which kind of follows the lines of,

"we wouldn't have faced this challenge delivered to us via 'life' if we weren't up to it"...

If i could turn the clock backwards, i could say "no" ...but i've also reached the point of acceptance - to the level where "no regrets" is starting to "blurrrrrr".

If your main experience with newborns is just via TV, i highly recommend you see them "live" (in the flesh) - get acquainted to what a screaming newborn sounds like (regardless of sensory-integrative issues vs "the normalcy that needs to be erradicated")...

Critical - to have other people in your social-support network (however small) who are also parents themselves. At the very least - no reliance on "just mum and dad" to take care of the new bub - it really does take a small village, even moreso if it's an ASD-kind of a kid

Always the hardest for the first in the social-group to have a child. I'd have a few good handfuls of other parents on my side as friends, before taking the plunge. People you can talk to at the very least, without the "judgement" crap - quite valuable in terms of surviving it.

Like, i'm 31yo now and I still fantasize about having a hysterectomy whilst the doctors look at me and say,

"How can you be so sure that you don't want to have another one at such a young age?!!"

I still get pestered by many people who do the,

"You should have another one" thing...

...but i'm quite ok with it. I'm happy to have,

"Just the one",

he's more than enough and i'm quite ok to give my everythig towards him.

Discuss, discuss, discuss - keep talking to others, take the time to reel through it all, before snipping.

For me - just the "one" - more than enough, for this lifetime. It's filled with terror, but i have my moments of "wow".

~

It's hard for me when i face other parents with "newbies" and they're the "placid (I LOVE YOU MUM AND DAD!!!)" type of babies, when my child was that choatic octapus constantly swirling & twirling.

~

Take the time to collect other people's experiences. Try to get some hands-on experience of chaging a newborn's nappy who might have ASD in the equation

If you see a mother, with a screaming newborn - hmm.... all these social ??? to seem any attempt to "HELP" as being completely inappropriate. Then again, i know of so many new mothers, being so tired of the "judgement" they face from people because they have newborns that fail to remain "silent" (NT or otherwise)...

better to have close friends, who give birth to the newbies.... friends, who would be etternally grateful, if you could just hold their screaming kid in yoru arms for a few hours, whilst poor mum'n'dad can gain some sleep...

get the hands-on experience/closeness - be there, for parents who endure something like childbirth - see it for your own eyes, before watching it through some video on a screen at a birthing seminar...

sorry to ramble.

HTH

I'm sorry i didn't read your initial post with greater clarity. I became side-swiped by how rough it was for me, and how it's taken me so many years of bloody-hard-work, to finally find myself incrementally journeying towards acceptance. I didn't mean it to come across as an attempt to invalidate that you've made your decision already, to convince you out of what you "know" for yourself. On the otherhand, as you initiated a post of this nature - perhaps that's why my mind might've thought it was coming across as a need for feedback before you got snipped. Why would a person ask these questions, if they already "knew" they could never forgive themselves for bringing another child into this world?

Whenever i've answered,

"It's just been too bloody hard for us!" in response to people asking me why i won't have another child, they invalidate the "hard". They've got no idea of the kind of "hard" that we've gone through. Our "hard" is often equated to the "hard" of parents with NT kids - falling into the same class of,

"being a mother(parent) is one of the most difficult jobs in the world.."

Regardless of AS or NT-ism on the otherhand, that statement is very true. In our experience - the difficulty has been amplified with an autistic child. More resources, more energy - greater needs. Having another child, would take away my capacity to give my son the absolute best that i can.

What's more rewarding? A child who physically rejects your body after childbirth from sensory-issues resulting in failure to breastfeed, or one that cuddles into your bosom to help mum generate some milk?

If it weren't for infant formula, my child wouldn't have survived.
If it wasn't for medical intervention resurrecting me back from the dead, i wouldn't have survived childbirth.

It took me a few years to make my peace with remaining alive, being forced to confront "life".

These days, it's hard for me to not view conflict as a supreme blessing and i do have my son to thank for that. Without hardship, it would not inspire change. Without hardship, we'd have no such thing as toilet paper to wipe our butts with, let alone a toilet to comfortably poop in, and a sewage system to keep the poop off the streets.

I look forward to the day of seeing humans devise a way to stop channeling the polluting poop out into the ocean, and finding a way of turning it into gold within our own homes. I look forward to the depletion of fossil fuels, rising fuel prices, global warming, traffic jams that will force and inspire humans to invent, adapt, and do what it takes - to survive.

I'm grateful for all the shit in my life, and how it inspired the birth so many amazing things. Life may be challenging for my child in a world acusing him of,

not being good-enough with his barely-legible handwriting at school.  

...but i'm grateful for the people who invented typewriters, computers, dictaphones, and speech-to-text convertors. They probably sucked like something chronic at handwriting ...or just not able to write at all.

I'm not having another child, because i could never forgive myself?

Nah ~

I'm not having another child because i don't feel confident that my family could survive it.

I remember taking my son when he was a newbown out into the park with my husband, and seeing a 3-4yo child together with it's parents. We had one of those moments of mutually smiling at each other. I asked the mum,

"Does it get better?"

She looked at my "newbie", smiling - and tells me,

"Enjoy it while it lasts."

I was devastated. What?! You mean it gets worse?!! That they're only "sweet" when they're babies?!

~

We then went through those terrible-twos kicking in a 18 months. My child was known as the screeching ring-wraith - his capacity to scream was just like those creatures in the Lord of the Rings.

We survived, i've been depression-free for the last 5 years - but we still get the screeching. Not as bad as it used to be, but it's still there.

It has been an,

"It gets better with time" kind of a thing for me, but i reflect on,

"Enjoy it while it lasts..."

My brain, rephrases it;

"Enjoy it while it's there..."

Fruitful for me to focus and keep my eyes more open to the enjoyable bits that exist in the 'now'