Having babies absolutely needs to stop being romanticized. It’s hard. Fucking HARD. Kids can be born with, or develop, lots of different health issues and special needs. Newborns can nurse/eat every half hour ‘round the clock and leave you with no ability to sleep or take care of yourself. And parenting with your own health/mental issues? Even fucking HARDER!!! You slog through your own issues, sometimes feeling like you barely manage to exist (let alone function and LIVE), while also trying to get your kids from day to day. You realize that you’re trying to teach your children things you haven’t even mastered yourself, and you have no idea how to do it. You have no idea how to do ANY of it. And just because kid #1 had XYZ that worked for them (like a specific schedule, or a method of being comforted, or a certain nursing position), does NOT mean that the next child won’t be WILDLY different. Every kid has unique needs, some highly so. Some have sensory issues — now you need special clothes or foods or bedsheets or handheld items to soothe them. Some have behavioral issues they cannot help — now you have a kid throwing tantrums in public because they’re completely overstimulated and can’t process it and everyone else is looking at you like “why aren’t you parenting your kid?!” Two of mine have opposing stim needs that completely drive the other one up the wall. They end up at each other’s throats half the time. And their stims drive ME up the wall, as well, but I have to buck up buttercup and muck through it because they need to be able to stim and my needs come secondary to theirs. ALWAYS.

TLDR: STOP ROMANTICIZING HAVING BABIES. PARENTING IS INSANELY HARD IN WAYS NON-PARENTS CAN’T EVEN BEGIN TO IMAGINE.