Babies ,/+ time
We were going to stop in to see my cousin and his ready-to-burst pregnant wife last night on our way home from the cottage, but timelines didn’t work out and we have to postpone our visit until after the baby’s born. So this post is going to be about babies and pregnancy and me and those things…maybe a little more personal than most past posts, or maybe not, we’ll see when we get there.
My cousin is one year older than me and his wife is my same age. They are the only folks I know who are my age who are having a baby. They also own a house and are married, two more things that remain exclusively within their claim compared to all my other friends. While I’m not envious of their marriage nor their status as homeowners, and maybe I’m not really envious of anything, I do think a lot about the fact that they will have a daughter living with them (for the next eighteen years at least) within the next five days. I think about this and it blows my mind. And I think I’m jealous…or maybe it’s better described as impressed.
As I might have already tipped, my group of friends is not exactly rocketing ahead into adulthood (of which cars, homes, careers and kids are the domain). Yes several of my friends have careers and cars, but that’s about as far along the line to growing up as it gets. While peripherally frustrating for me, for the most part this has no bearing on my life. And this is also, essentially, the case with my life: I maybe, sorta have a career, I have a car, I think often about kids and less often about owning a home. Distinctions that (at least in my head) set me apart from my friendos are that I have a partner and I have savings, which makes the latter two life steps that I’m thinking about increasingly possible and, as a result, increasingly things I want.
But then I look around and have no comparisons or reflections in my crew to help me weigh the odds. No one I know is in a similar situation (except my cousin, but he’s a cousin, not a friend with whom I’m really living my life in close proximity), which then makes me rethink whether I’m fairly adjudicating the situation I’m in. Not that I think I’m/we’re ready to have kids, but I’m getting to the point where I’m ready to throw that perspective out and just think about going for it.
But how do I know this is even something I/we should be thinking about—without a yardstick especially.
Am I just baby crazy? I think that’s supposed to happen around now.
Can we afford it? Or, where my mind’s going more lately, is that even something we should be using to weigh this decision (or maybe to weigh it but not determine it)?
What will/does my family think? Would this line of thinking shock them if they knew I was having it? Or are they, in the backs of their minds, waiting for an announcement, or a pre (planning) announcement?
Is it my place to be thinking about this and thinking about acting on this when I’m the younger sibling?
When people come to me for advice, I usually tell them that they’re only asking me because they want someone to tell them what they want to hear; internally or subconsciously they know which way they’re leaning, which decision they’re ultimately going to make, they just want external support to confirm their internal belief, to make them feel justified and correct. At the same time, they know what advice they don’t want to hear (and if they hear it they’re ready to ignore it).
I think I am almost in this position.
I’m not ready to ask for external advice, yet, which to me translates to mean I honestly don’t yet know what decision I want to make…but I’m getting there. At the same time, I’m pretty certain that if I started talking about this with people and they started advising me against it (you’re too young! you can’t afford it! etc.) I would want to ignore them; in other words, that is not what I want to hear—which, in turn should mean that I know what I want to hear and thus what decision I want to make, right? Kinda is what I would say to that.*
Things are happening. Thoughts are being thunk. I say there’s no one around I can compare myself too, not even my cousin, but, if I’m really honest, why not my cousin? My kneejerk is to claim that they didn’t really plan this, but in reality I know they planned this (and their marriage and home purchase) more than I’ve planned anything in my life. They just planned it with details and according to a logic that I don’t share. I’ve refused to see them as reflections of me because certain parts of their life and thought-process are very different. For this reason, I hesitate to see how they are quite similar. But they are. And they’re doing it. So why not ask how?
Maybe they are precisely whom I need to talk to, if I can ever get over myself.
*Please ignore that I’m ignoring my own logic on this one. I’m not ready to see that.
