A field guide to growing up without growing apart
You know what I mean? Isn’t it just the most irksome thing when somebody has the nerve to do something that affects ME negatively? Obviously there’s sarcasm here, but this is also a real-life emotion I’m struggling with right now. I don’t want to be […]
I’ve been dreading Christmas. Usually I love Christmas, but this year my husband is off working on a ship and I am spending Christmas alone with my parents. To me this sounded like a recipe for disaster. Not because I hate my parents, but because […]
Let me begin by saying that I am not pregnant. But what if I wanted to be? The idea of starting a family often niggles at the back of my mind, but is usually accompanied by feelings of anxiety. I used to think I could mark the ideal time to get knocked up on my calendar and sit back and wait a few years for that day to arrive, but these days the mere thought of procreating brings with it a lot more complicated and confusing thoughts.
I recently spent an awesome 3 weeks of vacation back in the U.S. of A., and most of that time was spent with my family and my husband’s family. The fun thing about my husband’s family is that his two siblings are both quite a bit ahead of us in the game of life—they each now have 3 children, well, one is still a fetus the size of a banana, but it counts. It’s always super fun to visit our nephews and niece; I love playing with them, cuddling them, and listening to all the cute things they say. And during this vacation we definitely got our fill of the cute kid-ness. Holding the newest baby, or worse, watching my husband hold her, tended to evoke warm, fuzzy feelings about how nice it would be to have one of our own. But then her older brother would poop his pants, and that rosy romantic idea would vanish. In fact, after living with the whole family and all those youngsters for seven straight days, there were moments when I was ready to swear off the idea of kids forever. Not because I don’t love them, but because there were so many painfully obvious differences between the relatively, fun, easy life I currently live and the lives my brothers and sisters-in-law were living. We slept in—they were up half the night with an infant or woken at the crack of dawn by restless toddlers. We kept our stuff neat, organized, and accounted for—they drove themselves crazy searching for the diaper bag that somehow went missing right before we were supposed to leave the house. We spent our days doing whatever we pleased—they were slaves to the schedules, moods, and needs of their kids.
Observing this dichotomy made me feel like I had two warring voices in my head, like if Smeagol was snuggled up against me going on about the fun blessings involved in creating and raising a new life, but meanwhile Gollum was in my other ear screaming and flinging his own feces around.
The way I see it, there are four stages a person goes through in relation to parenthood:
Up until recently I would have considered myself still in stage 1, with bigger fish to fry like enjoying being a newlywed and starting my career. But now, more than a year into my marriage, I can feel myself sliding suddenly into stage 2. If I got pregnant, would it be the end of the world? Probably not. Every month I find myself wondering…what if I didn’t start my period? Honestly, a small part of me kind of hopes that my birth control will fail.
But simultaneously, I love my life, and having a baby would irrevocably change things. No more traveling at the drop of a hat, no more free time to exercise or pursue hobbies, a huge influx in stress and responsibility…when I ponder these changes, I feel more committed than ever to waiting 4-5 years to start having kids, and maybe more!
Then you add in a variety of other considerations, such as the cost of having a baby, how many babies you want to have, and the fact that the risk of birth defects and other problems goes up the older the parents are. Do I want my kids to know my own parents? Because if I do, I should probably get started soon. But what about my career? If I start having kids before I really establish myself as a teacher, I might never go back. I think I’m too young for all this, but on the other hand it might be fun to be a young Grandma someday. It’s all so darn confusing, and there really doesn’t seem to be a perfect time.
So what’s my conclusion? Nothing really, other than that your 20’s have a nasty habit of throwing life-altering dilemmas like these in your face, and that bites sometimes. I’m sticking with birth control and the 4-5 year plan for now and trying to maximize this time in my life…but I don’t want to wait too long. I’m in stage 2. How about you?
A couple of weeks ago I posted about my frustrations with my youngest brother, Tweedle-Dum, who has dropped out of college and refuses to talk about anything real in his life. Now let’s return to Tweedle-Dee, the middle child. At least with him the picture […]
Oh Brother. Where, oh where to start. I’ve written here and there about him on this blog already but writing an entire post on my favorite (and only) brother seems ridiculously daunting. He and I go way back, back to when he was born and […]
Cinderslut’s recent post on brothers has inspired us all to think more about our sibling relationships. And so I’m taking you on a journey into the depths of my relationships with my brothers.
I am the youngest of three, and the only girl in my family. Growing up, I went through the normal stages of irritation with my brothers, in which they teased me and made me do things because they were bigger and they could–and I retaliated by being as obnoxious as possible. However, I came to the conclusion about halfway through highschool that I was ready to be friends with my brothers. I wanted them to accept me as an equal and have chats in which we imparted wisdom to each other. I’ll admit, I was a bit idealistic. And let’s just say that my brothers were not quite ready to have that kind of relationship when I was.
But now, we are all adults, we are all married, and we all live within a three mile radius of each other. So, that means things are different now–right? Wrong. It’s funny how distant you can feel from someone who lives in the same city as you. I don’t want to say we have a bad relationship, because that’s not true. We have no problems with each other, and there has been no love lost between us. It’s more that we seem to not really have much of a relationship at all. Mainly, our relationship consists of one of them calling me with the pretense of just catching up, and then after two minutes they “subtly” slip in the fact that they are looking for a babysitter on Saturday. Now of course, I love to be with my niece and nephew and am totally willing to babysit, I just find it humorous the way they ask me. I’d rather they just be up front with it, because the second I see one of their names on my caller ID I know that they are calling to ask a favor of me. Just chatting on the phone with my brothers about life is never something that happens.
Sometimes I find myself asking why? Why can’t I just call up my brothers to chat? Why is the only time I see them when I’m babysitting their kid? Should it be different? Do I still want it to be different? When my brothers and I first ended up in the same town as adults, I did try a little bit to involve them more in my life. I had them and their wives over to my house for dinner and talked about how we should have family get togethers once a month. Of course they said, “yeah that could be fun,” but none of them ever made the effort to make it happen, and I decided I didn’t want to be the instigator every time, so I just let our relationship slide into nothingness. I have no problem accepting some of the blame for the way our relationship is. But at the time it just felt like too much work to be the only one constantly pushing to spend time together. And now it’s just the way it is. The scary thing is that part of me is ok with things the way they are. I’ve accepted the fact that they are a 15 minute drive from me and I only see them every few months. But then the other part of me feels guilty that I’ve become ok with things the way they are.
I guess you could say that when it comes to my brothers I’ve just become lazy. It’s kind of sad, because I am so much a people person, and I love working at my other friendships. So why have I stopped working on two of the relationships that should mean the most?
I am the older sister to two younger brothers. Let’s call them Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum, and yes these are real nicknames my parents sometimes used for them when we were growing up. I haven’t mentioned them much on the blog, most likely because I live […]
So this whole working for my dad thing is complicated. The major things are great. We get along ridiculously well and when we get home we don’t bolt to opposite corners of the house. My mom isn’t too jealous of the time we spend together […]
I must say that for my post this week I was at a loss on what to write. The creative juices didn’t seem to be flowing freely. Part of this had to do with thinking about what has happened in my life recently. As I tried to think about what’s been going on, I could not come up with much. I’m at a spot where I feel that my life is frankly a little boring.
It is not that I wish to complain of unhappiness, far from it. However, it just seems to me that most days I spend, working, doing things around the house, and then hanging out with my husband. And maybe about once a week I hang out with friends. None of those things independently are super boring, but I think what I’m feeling is the drowsiness from being sucked into a routine. My days are all spent in a similar fashion. There are not any impending adventures or late night shenanigans.
It makes me long for the days of college. I remember that any time I did not have something to do, all I had to do was walk to the nearest dorm room of one of my friends and fun would ensue. Oh for the days of late night stair races, spontaneous photo shoots, and jumping in public fountains.
Now of course, I could still do those things now. But I feel like the older we all get, the less time we have. Outings are rarely spontaneous, but must be planned far in advance in order to accommodate everyone’s schedules. This Christmas, the four princesses could not even all get together. Only three of us could hang out, and it was only for a couple hours. I’m not blaming anyone for having their own life and schedule, but I just feel like my life isn’t as exciting if I can’t have everyone around me all of the time.
I guess part of growing up is creating a life that is more separated. Life can’t be like college forever, having all of your friends only seconds away from you with plenty of spare time for any random adventure you can think of. But that makes me sad, because to me, my friends are my family. So what do you do when your friends start to create their own families? What do you do when you used to share one life, but suddenly everyone has their own?
In my dreams, there is a world in which all of my favorite people live together in one giant house/ and or in very close proximity. It only takes me five seconds to walk over to see someone, and there is always someone to talk to. There would be a giant community lodge with a fireplace and it would be stocked with snacks and board games. Also, we would live near the woods and the ocean, so there would always be somewhere to explore.
I promise I’m not crazy, I just love my friends a lot. I don’t want growing up to mean that we have to grow apart.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I miss all of you. I know this was a very convoluted post, and I probably rambled a lot, but that is all I really wanted to say. I miss you.
This Christmas I was in the odd position of not being the hostess in my own home. I had gotten my parents to agree to come to our house since I got practically no time off of work. Convincing them was a miracle in the […]