Why We Don't Have Kids Yet - My Messy Beautiful Story

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One of my first interactions with a southerner after I moved to Louisiana was when a woman said to me, “So, what’s your story?  Do you have kids?”  I was 23 and thought the question was absurd.  Kids at 23?  Of course not, crazy lady. 

I met my husband 2 years later.  We both want kids.  We’re both the kind of people who have always wanted kids.  He’s the guy who’s wanted to be a dad for his entire life.  And I’m pretty sure he’s going to be awesome at it (He’s, at least, really good at corny, dad jokes).  When we were first married I was only 25 and thought I was way too young for kids.  And I really wasn’t ready for it, regardless of my age.  I was suddenly legally bound to this guy I’d known for about a year and living in Oklahoma (a place that I was fairly certain was made up, until I actually got here).  For a long time I truly was not ready for babies.  I was figuring out what it was like to be a wife, to create a life with this other person and not alongside him, like it had been when we first dated.

Now we’ve been married for 2 years.  I’m 28 and my husband is 30.  We’re ready for babies.  Most of the people we spend time with have kids.  My husband teaches elementary school.  I babysit and work in a day care on an as-needed basis.  We know it’s hard to have a life with a baby.  We’ve seen the exhaustion and frustration in our friends.  We can see beyond the excitement and joy of having a baby.  And we’re still ready.

But, we’re not trying to have babies right now.  Even though we’re both emotionally prepared for parenthood (as prepared as one can be), our life is not in the place it needs to be for us to have a baby.  I’m in school right now.  And, since neither of us are independently wealthy, we’re working very hard to make school a reality without adding to our already high amount of debt.  I can’t work full time while I’m in school.  So, I have a virtual assistant job that I love, and I pretty much jump at any other chance to make even a little bit of money.  Every extra dollar not accounted for in our budget goes towards nursing school.  My husband works very hard during the school year as a teacher, and works summers as a camp counselor.  While we may be ready for kids, our life is not ready for kids.

This makes life painful and challenging.  The beauty of life without kids is not lost on us.  On Saturdays we stay in bed all morning talking, watching tv, and eating donuts.  We know we couldn’t do that if we had kids.  We spend our evenings relaxing and unwinding from the day, instead of feeding and bathing and putting a child to sleep.  We never need to tiptoe around our house at naptime.  Diapers are not a part of our daily life.  Crying and tantrums are not a part of our daily life (well, with the exception of mine...).  We can leave town for the weekend without too much rearranging of our lives.  We can go out with our friends until late without having to pay someone to stay in our house.  And we appreciate getting close to, if not more than, 8 hours of sleep a night.  We certainly do not need a reminder of how we’re lucky we don’t have kids yet.  We get it.

And yet, life is messy when you're wanting kids and not having them.  When we first got married we would dream about the day we’d have kids.  We talked about baby names, we talked about how we would announce the good news to everyone, we made jokes about how our kids would get the worst combination of my red hair and his dark skin.  We don’t do that as much now.  Because, it kind of hurts.  There are days when I panic that after all this waiting, I won’t be able to get pregnant for some reason.  When I see people announce their pregnancies on Facebook, I’m excited, and then immediately a little sad.  After being very close to both my sister and my sister-in-law as they navigated the first couple of years of parenthood, I’m pretty sure of which parenting books I’ll read, how we’ll introduce food to our baby, the challenges of breastfeeding, how I’m going to prefer to cloth diaper (and the best ways to do it), different naptime methods, what developmental stages our baby will go through and when those will happen.  I know what wonder weeks are, I know good techniques for soothing a teething baby, I know when to call the doctor and when to ride it out.  I know we’re not going to find out the sex of our baby until they’re born.  I know that whether our first baby is a boy or a girl, they will have a family name.  And, writing all of these things down is making me feel an ache in my heart knowing that we have at least 2 years before we can realistically start thinking about these things.

I know that if having a baby was more important to me than being a nurse, we could have one right now.  But, I also know that if I don’t become a nurse, there’s really not much I can do to allow me as many of the financial and health (insurance-wise) benefits of being a nurse.  And, I don’t want to sacrifice one dream for the other.  At the risk of sounding selfish, I want it all.

It sucks that we started our marriage with a lot of debt.  It sucks that it took several years for me to figure out that nursing was where my passion lies.  It sucks that there’s no convenient way for me to take classes at night or online so I can still work full-time.  It sucks that we both feel ready to have babies before I’m out of school.  It sucks that we have no way of knowing how easy or hard it will be to get pregnant.  It sucks that we watch other parents doing what we want to do every single day.

Don’t get me wrong, parent-friends.  We love your kids.  We LOVE your kids.  We talk about your kids on a daily basis.  We look at pictures of your kids on Facebook and laugh about them and talk about how cute they are.  We take joy in your kids’ accomplishments.  We love hanging out with your kids.  And when your kids hug us, it melts our sad hearts that just want kids of our own. 

But, underneath all of that joy and love for your kids, we hurt.  Because we wish we could be telling our friends stories about our kids, and not your kids.  We wish it was our kids reaching for us when they get hurt.  We wish we could participate in your conversations about your kids with stories about our kids.  We wish we could talk about how tired we are without feeling guilty because, as parents, you’re obviously much more tired than we are.

We know that in the grand scheme of our marriage (which should last a while…), the 4+ years without kids shouldn’t feel that significant.  We know that when we have sulky, moody teenagers, we’ll probably reminisce about these days.  We know that we should be savoring every good night of sleep we get, instead of dreaming for sleepless nights with a baby.

And we know that we have to get through the messy, to get to the beautiful.  But some days (like today), it’s really hard to be patient.

So, for now, we'll keep living vicariously through your highs and lows of parenting, and enjoy being the fun aunt and uncle who still get to sleep all night.