Sunday, June 18, 2006

On Hold or Over?

I had my daughter when I was 21. She was conceived during an immediately regretted fling with an ex and when I found out I was pregnant I knew that keeping the baby would be tantamount to using a sperm bank. I would have no help. I have always known that abortion was something I could never do unless testing showed tay-sachs or some other horrific disease which would cause extreme pain and then childhood death. So I thought about adoption which wasn't odd since many members of my family are adopted, and decided on that. It would be best for the baby, since I couldn't support a child enough to give it any of the things I thought babies should have. And welfare wasn't an option. I figured that if I knew from the very start that I couldn't take care of the child myself that I had no business expecting the tax-payers to foot the bill. Welfare is a last resort, not a first resource. But my mother told me about guardianship. If someone volunteers to become legal guardian of a child, the mother does not have to give up rights and the other person's medical insurance would cover the baby. So I kept my daughter, bought cheap diapers (they were the only thing I asked for at my shower), breastfed for the first year, and made babyfood in the blender.

Now Tom and I have been married for about a year and a half, and as the plan to get his vasectomy reversed keeps getting pushed back (it costs like 7 grand) I wonder how old I will be when our kids are born. Medical reasons aside, I don't want to have kids past 35. I made the conscious decision to cut that chunk of my life from the middle. Lots of people have their kids in their 40s, and that's fine. They have the 20 years before that to take vacations and go out with friends, to be unencumbered. I, however, planned on doing all that from maybe 45 on. I want to retire someday and travel, go on cruises, take classes. I don't want to be 60 trying to put a kid through college. Tom doesn't understand that since he's almost 40 now. But he drives, he sees the country all the time, and he has had the freedom to run to the grocery store at 2am. So if we have kids, which is something we both want, then it's going to have to be in the next 5 years. I would like my child-bearing years to overlap for at least a little while with my kids'. I don't want to break my hip moving someone's CD collection into a dorm somewhere. I like the idea of putting the party years on hold for children, not of them being over forever.

1 comment:

Sally Heap said...

Check out the link in the title: I made it into the Chicago Tribune.