Guilt Trip

I have discovered a fatal flaw in my plan to be a perfect housewife.  The books tell me that I have to have kids, and I don't want to.  Here is the way I see it: I have kids all day long at my job.  I love them very much,  but I like the part when they go home at the end of the day and I can have some peace and quiet.  What's so horrible about that?  Everything, apparently.  Check out this quote from one of my books:  "Couples who marry without any intention of having children, even though able to do so, are often motivated extremely selfish desires which, in themselves, defeat marriage, since marriage assumes love, the opposite of selfishness."

Rude!  Why can't I be a selfless wife if I don't want to be a mother?  It's not like the reason I don't want to have kids is because I want to have extra time to sit on my duff eating bon bons and watching Jersey Shore. I don't watch Jersey Shore, and I've never eaten a bon bon in my life.  I don't want to have kids for a lot of reasons.  There's the work reason, there's the fact that I like having extra time to write children's literature so that I can enrich the lives of children all over the place, and there's the fact that my doctor said that considering my current medical conditions, a pregnancy could result in many health difficulties for me and for my baby.  So really, I just don't want one.  Rex and I have prayed many times that God would give us a desire for kids if we're supposed to have them, and so far we don't have that desire at all.  So basically, we were okay with that conclusion until I read page 209 of the book Your Marriage and Family Living.  I took a picture of that page for you:

Bad news, Rex.  We have a 70% chance of divorce because we don't have kids!!!  Forget the fact that we love each other, constantly sacrifice for each other, and are best friends.  We don't have any diapers to change, so we're screwed.

Except..........  does this graph look weird to anyone else?  SEVENTY percent of marriages without children fail?!  That simply can't be true, especially back in 1946 when this book was written.   I tried to do some extra research on this issue, but unfortunately there aren't many online articles about divorce rates in 1946.  I can tell you, though, that 1946 was before birth control was widely available, therefore virtually all families had children.  I'm sure the divorce rate was lower then than it is now, but I doubt it was as low as 8%.  I just think these stats seem very strange and unfounded.  I wish they would have told me a bit more about where they found these numbers.  Frankly, I think they're bunk.

***EDIT***  I did find some research on divorce rates in 1946.  They were at roughly 20%, which was "deplorably high" and "an indication of an unstable society."  So yeah, I think the stats in the book were dumb.

So I guess I'll put page 209's advice with the previously referenced asbestos article on my list of "Rules I'm Not Following."