Is it selfish for me to want a child

[Rising Phoenix]

with my history of mental illness.....am I damning any child of mine to a lifel of pain?

I am not pregnant, but feel that clock a tickin......I have had people tell me I am selfish, but ...... I think would be a wonderful mother

any thoughts on those with a history of mental illness being parents....

ps.....in the book An Unquiet Mind.....which I am sure most of you have read, a pdoc with bipolar had a pcp tell her she shouldn't have children because of her biploar

[Droopy]

1. It's natural for anybody to want to have a chld

including those of us who have a mental illness. If you can provide for a child, love her, and teach her them how to be a good person, I think that would be wonderful. But you are not selfish if you don't have children. And regarding mental illness, a child born to someone who has an illness has a slightly higher chance of developing an illness as well. Slightly. The chances are very good that she would be okay.

[mopinko]

2. i'd say 2 things

one- agree with droopy. passing on the dna is the sole purpose of life for nearly every being. we human think we are more cerebral than that, and are making rational decisions about that. i think, mostly, that that is a delusion.
two- bipolar runs in my family. nonetheless, the majority of my family is perfectly stable and mentally healthy. my sister, who is very ill, has 2 kids. one is just the greatest. the other i think is a little iffy. that has as much to do with having one of those tightly would viet nam vets for a dad as it does his genes, maybe. hard to say.

one last comment is that i thought i was going to be a wonderful mother. and when they were babies, i was. but all in all, i wasn't all that great. everything turned out to be so much harder than i thought it was going to be. i did not cope very well with my bp daughter, and things slopped all over from there. i can tell you that what i went through with all that, i would wish on my worst enemy.
i think 4 of the 5 would tell you i did a crappy job. probably our genes lie to us, and tell us all we would be great parents, and since we want to believe them, we do.
could you be your own mother? that is the question we all ought to ask ourselves when we think about this question, no matter who we are.

[Rising Phoenix]

3. I thought about this long and hard

and I realized yes, I would love to have me as a mother. Thanks for asking the question that everyone should ask themselves before raising a child.

[mopinko]

5. you have my question backwards.

the question is- look at what it was like for your mother. could you go through what she has gone through to mother you? i'm not making any assumptions at all about what that has been like. i have no idea.
i just know that, for me, being a mom has turned out to be nothing like i thought it would be. and i am not just referring to my bp kid. all my kids have had their problems. even though my baby is the sweetest and easiest of the 5, she also has had medical problems that have been both frightening and frustrating.
dealing with schools and teachers is a pain with 9 kids out of 10. you get put in the middle, trying to support your child on the one hand, and trying to support the teachers when you think they are correct on the other.
it's the hardest damn job on the planet, and there is pretty much no payback until they are in their late 20's or 30's. and that is if all goes well. there might not ever be. your kid might hate you. your kid could grow up to be a drug addict. your kid might get murdered. you put your heart out there for whatever the world can blow at you. honestly, i don't really recommend it. i love my kids. but it has been a million times more heartache than i ever imagined. not for the faint of heart.

[mdmc]

10. I never thought of it that way

I could never be father to me. I couldn't handle me!

[La Lioness Priyanka]

4. would you be able to care after this child and provide it a stable & loving environment >?

if so, then its fine. if not, no.

(ps: i would have said this to anyone who questioned child having)

[elleng]

6. VERY hard job.

Important part is whether you'd be a single parent. YOU might prefer life like that/this, but with the additional burdens of 'childrearing,' lots changes.

Contrary to what some here have said, our problems arise now that daughters are 24 and 21. My depression has been last 5 (?) years, due in part to emotional abuse of husb/their father, and girls are unhappy that I'm 'different' from great 'do all' mother of the past. SO, life is complicated.

Keep thinking.

[EFerrari]

7. How can it be selfish to want anything?

:shrug:

What you decide to do, is something else. But wanting a child? What you want is what you want.

[no name no slogan]

8. For me, I could never have a child because of what I've gone through

And, quite frankly, I can barely take care of myself as it is, and I'm a (nearly) 40-year-old straight white guy, with a college education and a good job and decent place to live. The responsibility of being a father terrifies me, and I don't know if I would be able to deal with myself if I brought a life into this world and screwed it up.

[mdmc]

11. ditto

ditto to everything you said, except I don't have decent housing.

[mdmc]

9. It is very natural and not selfish to want children in our lives

My RA meds make it unwise to have kids (my meds cause severe retardation in offspring, according to my Rhoomy).
But I want kids.
I can't afford them
I am too selfish to care for them
I am too unstable to parent
I am ...
but
I am a pretty good uncle.