[ant_li0n]

Wow yeah you really hit the nail on the head for me. My wife and I weren't trying to have kids but we weren't trying not to have kids either, if you get my drift. Looking back on it, if we had been "smart" about deciding when the right time would happen, we might never have had kids.

Having kids is hands-down the best thing I've ever done but also the hardest. Not because of the amount of work, because it's really not that much work. It's more of the dramatically uncomfortable shift in perspective: Realizing I'm not the main character in this story. It still hits me sometimes.

[mbg721]

The thing that struck me about having kids is that no individual task is all that hard, but there are a lot of them and you have to be available at all times. It can wear you down like any other on-call situation.

[illiac786]

Something that still hits me (hard) is how you suddenly have to be a model, or at least try. You can't take the easy road anymore, little eyes are watching your every move.

I started thinking over my generous way of giving ethical and generally grandiloquent advice when I started being held up to it by ever watchful little eyes... I find this being the hardest, either way: admitting I'm not so great in some respects, or bettering myself. Both are incredibly hard.

[FeloniousHam]

> It's more of the dramatically uncomfortable shift in perspective: Realizing I'm not the main character in this story

This! I was the first of our group to have kids, and I'd "the camera isn't on me anymore". I thought of Smallville where the Duke boy was just a background father-person.

[anon291]

The entire phrase 'trying for kids' is a neologism only enabled by birth control

For most of history, people just did what you did and had the results you did

[bryanlarsen]

On the contrary, "trying for kids" was accompanied by an elaborate ceremony to kick off the process. This big ceremony was often so successful that the kids would arrive 5 months after the ceremony!

[em-bee]

one person can have a child in 9 months. so two people must be able to have a child in half that time. the math checks out.

[dagw]

Trying for kids means making sure you have sex at the right times of the month, something humanity has known about for millennia. Equally people not 'trying for kids' made sure to only have sex at the 'wrong' time of the month, again something humans have been doing for millennia.

[anon291]

Up until very recently, there was very little knowledge that pregnancy lasted nine months... even among the 'learned'. Old pregnancy manuals talk about pregnancies taking anywhere from a few months to many many months. Without ultrasound and HcG tests, there is very little indication a woman is pregant until she starts showing or feeling the baby (and even then, a new mother may not even notice until she's showing anyway).

As for fertility awareness, I don't believe the methods used prior to the modern day were super effective. Regardless, the knowledge was not present.

So I'll restate my claim. Up until the modern day, there was no such thing as trying for children. There were married couples engaging in socially sanctioned sex, which obviously leads to children. Or there were fornicators that we knew could have children, but was socially unacceptable, and few fornicators actually wanted children from their unions.

[helij]

Quick comment about your first paragraph. There is a really strong signal that a woman is pregnant in absence of period.

[anon291]

If a woman's periods are regular and she experiences no bleeding in pregnancy. Many women's periods are not regularly, especially so if many woman are malnourished. Moreover, bleeding in pregnancy (esp early pregnancy) is fairly common. Thus, if you read older gynecological manuals, they clearly claim that pregnancy lasts some range of months. Most people realized that it was centered around 10 months, but there were many doctors claiming that the ranges were much higher than we'd accept today, because they had no reliable method to test for conception.

If you bleed like some women do during pregnancy, then you may have no indication you're pregnant until you obviously show. It's unlikely, but not impossible, and the doctors had no objective measure by which to say otherwise unless they could feel or hear the baby.

[cafard]

How many millennia? Mary Beard in SPQR writes that the Romans had the right time of the month as wrong as they could.