#readingrobot

oh, the dichotomy;

"being an infp means you're a Romantic !!"

"but i'm aro ..."

some black tea and the great gatsby for tomes and tea this sunday.

for me, being raised afab, it was kind of ingrained in me that i was going to have kids. and even in my progressive family my mom expected me to eventually carry her grandkids even at a young age. often times i'll come across situations irl where an ~altercation~, for lack of a better term, is happening between a child and parent and i'm like huh how will i, when i'm a parent, deal with it. and it stresses me out! how would i respond? then i have to remind myself that i don't have to have kids and i probably won't. being exposed to like mom-tiktok and mom-instagram has also made me think more about how i would raise a child. what would i do in order to ensure that my child was being raised to be kind and good. how would i make sure they got health care they needed? how would i as a mom take time for myself? and the i take a step back and think to myself, i don't need to have a kid. i don't need to be a mom. i don't need to worry about that because i don't want that for me personally.

and this is *for sure* an intersection of my aroace-ness and me being a woman. as a kid of any gender you're raised in an antonormative society that values romantic and sexual love above everything else and that the basis of society is the family, the nuclear family. it is not so subtely implied that in order to be happy you must marry a person of the opposite gender and have kids. as a girl, more specifically, you're raised to believe that in order to be "completed" and "satisfied" you must not only have a husband but also kids.

and so i think a lot of us do have these worries and thoughts about how we're going to raise kids or even how we're going to be a good spouse and then we have to remind ourselves that no, that isn't the end-all-be-all. we don't have to have kids or even marry!