Don't Go to the Movies.

When I said background about how we got here...
THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT.
You all know how we got here. Not talking about that. What I meant was how we went from being together for fifteen years or so with no intention of having children to entering the end of the first trimester of pregnancy...
Kate didn't want kids.
There's a lot of reasons why that's the case, almost none of which I'm going to enumerate, but she didn't want them. One reason that will I disclose is that she mostly doesn't like them.
I mostly don't like them either. This is mostly due to bad experiences with other people's children. That's been changing over the last three years or so, as friends of ours have begun having kids with some regularity. This has given us the opportunity to see that attentively raised kids can turn out as something besides unruly misbehaving little savages.
I used to joke that if we were ever going to have kids we'd have to stop going to the movies.

We generally go to weekend matinees. They're cheaper, and usually less crowded. The downside of the weekend matinee is that you occasionally run into someone that takes their kids to some R-Rated film that's wildly inappropriate for children. In our experience it's mostly men that do this. Then Dad proceeds to completely ignore the inappropriate behavior of his unruly misbehaving little savages while they talk, throw food, poke each other, squirm, and otherwise create a general annoyance for both Kate and I. Also, they invariably sit next to, or right behind, Kate.
I know, it's a matinee, and you have to expect children at weekend matinees.
That would be a valid statement if we were going to see the latest Dreamworks animated offering. We go to the late show during the week for those. On weekend matinees we go see R rated films that children have no business being exposed to.
Case in point:
We went to see The Brotherhood of the Wolf. Not a great film, but not horrible. I remember the kids and their loser dad that sat next to us way more than the movie.
The whole family comes in during the opening credits. Dad escorts the kids to our row, two elementary school age boys. During the opening credits the two boys get into a loud argument over who's going to sit next to Kate (each wanted the other to sit next to Kate). They finally sit down as the first scene begins. The first scene is the very graphic depiction of a young woman being murdered by an unseen monster. Really graphic, like, cringe-inducing graphic. Dad sits there with his straw in his face pointedly not telling the two kids to shut up and sit still. The next scene takes place in a Parisian whorehouse and the opening shot is a woman nude from the waste up. Dad finally tells the kids to do something.
Not to shut up.
Not to sit still.
He tells them to cover their eyes.
Cover their fucking eyes.
Dad has no problem with the two little brats watching a graphic depiction of a woman being violently beaten to death, but they need to cover their eyes lest they be exposed to a pair of uncovered breasts.
As an aside, I believe to this day that this is a micro-cosmic example of why we have predatory violence commited against women in our country.
Anyhow, the only directive that the kids got from their dad through the whole film was to cover their eyes anytime they might get to see some boobs.
Kate turns to me at the end of the film and loudly announces "Have I mentioned yet today how much I'm NOT HAVING KIDS?"
She hadn't.
That's kind of an extreme example, of course, but not an unusual occurrence. And it's only one of many reasons why she didn't want kids. So, I had pretty much decided a long time ago that we weren't going to have kids. At one point before she and I met, I might have wanted to, but it certainly was never important enough to be a deal breaker for me as far as being with Kate is concerned. Also, I don't have to carry them around inside my body for nine months, then go through the process of getting them out (a process which I heard a female comedian describe as analogous to taking your own lower lip and pulling it up over your head). Given that, I really think my position on the whether or not to get pregnant and give birth question needs to be subordinate to Kate's.
About two years ago she changed her mind. To this day, I'm not entirely certain why she changed her mind, but I'll speculate in my next post...