This article gave me something of a start.  I had no idea until I read it that our son AJ, now six, had a less than 5% chance of ever coming into this world.

My wife was just shy of 42 when he was born.  Our older son John had come along almost exactly three years earlier.  You see, I just wasn’t sure for a long, long time that I even wanted kids, which was just plain stupid but there you go.

I count my blessings that I got to bumble along until I was nearly 40 before I finally figured things out, then was able to have two happy, healthy boys with my dear wife.  Now I know most bumblers like me aren’t so lucky.

I’m not even sure what drove my reluctance.  Part was probably seeing many friends have kids earlier and become complete slugs, doing nothing with their lives but working and taking care of children.  I wasn’t wise enough to know that was a choice they made, and I could make a different one.  Part may have been my growing up in a large family and just wanting to enjoy having money and relative solitude and comfort for a while (not that I was ever poor or wanted for anything important).  And part was certainly our modern sickness that devalues having children when we’re supposed to have children.

In that vein, I feel very, very sorry for our young women today.  Modern society tells them they can have it all — that they DESERVE to have it all and if they don’t someone is victimizing them.  Trouble is, the ones victimizing them are the ones spouting this “wisdom.”  The real wisdom is in reality as spelled out in the article at the link above:  once these young women get their degrees, work a while, get advanced degrees and work some more, while traveling and living the good life, many of them will find that they may not be able to get husbands and even if they do, may not be able to have children.  And too late they’ll realize that the one thing they can’t have is the one thing that will, for the vast majority of us, in any way be our lasting legacy in this world.

As an aside, it’s equally sad and victimizing that feminists have succeeded in making the worst male behaviors — self-centeredness, prurience and lasciviousness, commitment-phobia and living for trivial things — the things most celebrated in our popular culture about being a woman nowadays.  There are three generations and counting that are suffering because of this horribly destructive ideology, and I truly feel sorry for them, and for our society that let this happen with scarcely a whimper.