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Becoming a Parent Will Ruin Your Life

If you are on the fence about parenthood and think you could live a happy life without needing to procreate, my advice is unequivocal: stay the course because having children will ruin your life.

Guinevere Vanderpants
8 min readMay 29, 2023

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the author and her kids, circa January 2012

Look, I wasn’t doing anything all that interesting before my kids were born. I spent my twenties drinking way too much, smoking, and quitting jobs. Writing poems, moving cities, and actively ignoring attempts to process past trauma. Basically trying not to kill myself while also slowly killing myself. Methods my subconscious focused on, in order of odds of likelihood, appear to be: alcohol poisoning [top choice, obviously], lung cancer [very slow and painful when compared to the first, but cigarettes are amazing], and, murder given my propensity for going home with perfect strangers to places I would never be able to pinpoint or probably even remember.

I wouldn’t have said this, of course, but the pattern of bad decisions does tend to make one wonder. Some real boring, middle-management level self-loathing. I was not creative with this pain at all; it was an approximately decade-long, D-movie level of dramatics and chaos. I will try to spare…

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Guinevere Vanderpants
Guinevere Vanderpants

Written by Guinevere Vanderpants

Artist and writer. On double-secret probation.

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