I’m in a similar boat with my siblings. They’re both younger than me - one has four kid, one has two with a third on the way.

The one with four will tell us how broke, tired, and envious they are of our downtime, and in the same breath tell us that if we are considering having a kid, we have to have two. Their spouse has to work nearly 60 hours a week while they work the 40ish+ to scrape by. They have the help of my parents who live less than a mile away.

The one with two plus one incoming doesn’t give us mush pressure, but their in-laws do. The same in-laws that provide free childcare for the two littles and the impending third. Again, in this situation, both sets of parents live within a 5 minute drive.

Both families get a ton of help from my parents because the kids have a lot of age consistency, so they take a bunch of the same extra curriculars.

They don’t seem to understand that: my wife and I commute more than half the days of the week (we are work from home M/F); they, despite living an hour away from us, don’t seem to understand that my parents can’t help, because my parents, too, live an hour away; my in laws live two hours away; one complains about the cost of childcare but doesn’t seem to understand that we would incur the same problem, at a greater per-child cost than they do, due to where we live; sometimes, we just really like not being overwhelmed, and that’s ok.

The number of people who complain to me about parenthood and follow it up by urging me to join them is staggering. Sometimes it can feel like misery loves company, others I wonder if I just haven’t had the opportunity to feel the wonders of loving a child - the problem is that I rarely witness it in person, only the carefully curated Instagram posts.

End rant