Babies

Tis the season for babies! My sister, Wax Job, is pregnant. A few of my good friends are pregnant. A few more are trying everything the doctor can throw at them to get pregnant. (If only we knew how hard it was to get pregnant when we were younger...) And many more friends are happily chasing after their 6 week, 8 month, and 2 year olds. Babies, babies, babies!

Most women want to have children and many consider it their calling in life. Traditionally, we spend our early years toting around toy dolls and our twenties toting around 1, 2 or maybe 3 of the real thing. For those women who choose not to have children (I just read an article stating 12% of women are childless by choice) there are many confused questions from peers and parents.

There are those women who want children and those who do not. But there is also a middle ground. Having children is not like graduating from law school. Or running a marathon. You can not set your eye on the prize and then go get it. Those women whose sole goal is to have children often come off desperate. And those women who seem not to focus on children are thought to be cold and selfish. Saying you want to have children is really akin to saying you want to have a family, and to have a happy family with beautiful children, my romantic American ideal is that you first have to fall in love. To sacrifice this love for the sake of having children, you often sacrifice the happy family all together. But women, even with today's modern technologies, have a window of opportunity in which we can get pregnant. We can't defer love and marriage until our 50's and hope to have the baby carriage follow.

There are those women who find love early and children follow. They are blessed. For the rest of us with biological and social pressures on our heels, we are in quite a quandary. We are left with a choice: ensure children by expediting the love part and finding someone to procreate with or keep looking for that one-in-a-million love and risk being beyond our child bearing years when w wed. (Or... gasp... maybe never wed at all.) I have always leaned toward the latter. It has always been more important to have a lasting love than a premature family.

But that doesn't mean I don't want a family. It doesn't mean it wouldn't be easier to have fallen in love at 27, wed, and now be burping one child while chasing around another. That sounds lovely. And just because I do not fear being alone, it does not mean all of my goals have been met. I am not one of the 12% who would choose to be childless. I respect that choice and understand it on many levels. I would love to have a family and children, but I believe a family is not made up of a mother and children. It is made up of the love between a husband and wife (or two wives/two husbands) and their children. And I would rather be childless than loveless.

So, for those with babies and those without and those who don't want to have a drop of spit up on them, EVER, we're all going to be fine. I wish life came with a road map, but it seems there are always dead ends and there are always new roads being constructed. For now, I am going to enjoy being an auntie. (Read: Buy them cute outfits, feed them sugar, and give them back.) And maybe someday I will be a mother too. And maybe I will not. But if we focus on what we have, not what we don't, we are sure to bring more happiness our way.