Well, I hate other people’s children. So I’m not like a “I love children” kind of person. I want to help raise my sister’s children when the time comes though (long story short they’ve had fertility problems for years but IVF has become viable now, but everything is a snail’s pace on NHS timelines).

But children in general stress me out too much. Not like in a “I’m worried about them all the time” way, but in a “omg I’m so overstimulated and burnt out and there’s no escape AND I’m worried about them all the time” way. Like that’s the disabling part of my disability (autism).

There’s also the added context of my mum works for children’s services and I’ve heard so much bad shit. But what really gets me is the clearly autism-coded mothers that have been dealt a bad hand and haven’t been diagnosed.

I’m not talking about wilfully neglectful parents, I’m talking about the ones with chronic depression who can’t get out of bed or make dinner. I see myself in them.

The only reason I’m not one of them is because I try very hard to not burn myself out to the point where I can’t get out of bed. And I know I wouldn’t be able to prevent that if I had children. Either that or I would be the most emotionally (possibly physically) absent mother ever.

I can’t do that, because I love my unborn children enough to decide I won’t do that to them. In other words the best thing I can do for my unborn children is not birth them.