What I'd like to discuss it a bit unorthodox for this forum, yet this is its rightful home. This is about my experience opting for the conventional path until very late in life, only to realize at 36 that I'd been sold the lie of single female childless happiness, what I did about it, and my warning for any of you embracing convention as I once did.
Educated at a liberal arts college in America's northeast, at 22 I was a liberal on fire. I was ready to share my taxes with the poor. I wanted to save everyone. I intellectually explored socialism. This is what all smart people who were college-educated did as far as I understood. And I didn't need a man or a family to imbue my life with meaning. I worked, worked harder, worked some more, and married a guy who didn't want children, just like me, in my late 20's. Fast-forward about seven years - I'm 35-ish and my husband has decided he'd prefer being a deejay to his solid office job, quits working and begins his exploration of sloth. Over the next two years our departing value systems surfaced, and I'd realized there were things I'd overlooked by choice in an effort to fit into the happy mold. Because when you aren't planning to have children with someone, there is SO much you don't notice. I'd done bleeped up. Badly. I barely knew my true self any more. We divorced.
Now anyone telling you the aftermath of a divorce is terrific didn't take the commitment seriously. I had given my word until death did we part, but none of that could force a grown man to stay and try to work it out. He wanted freedom, not marriage. He showed up at the front door the next Valentine's Day with a bouquet of roses. I closed the door on the Freedom Flowers. It was the first time he'd bought me flowers.
So there I was at 36, divorced with an ex who wanted to get back together. I suspected he wanted a sloth sponsor. I suspected I was completely clueless about everything that was important. I read the forums. I knew I was the undesirable on the dating scene. I'd only be seen as someone looking for a sperm donor, just like every other woman in her late 30's trying to out-cycle the Peloton of ovarian rot. I really didn't want to date. So I hung out with the other women who I slowly began to loathe. They hated men. They despised them. Misandry hadn't ever heard of THESE women. But oh, how they wanted one. And why would someone want something if not for its value? For the ego, of course.
I make it sound as if this period of my life was spent in abject misery, and it would be wrong if I didn't correct that perception. I have always been, and will hopefully always be, the kind of person who just makes the best of her situation. I find it's far more reasonable to adapt one's expectations and approach than it is to wallow in what's been lost. I was socializing a bit more as months passed and I soon met the man who is now my husband. We were only friends at first in a large social circle, spending afternoons together or just taking long walks around town. Approached by a mutual friend who made me aware of my new friend's romantic interest, I laughed. He was thirteen years my junior, and I wasn't about to be anyone's cougar. My ego was fiercely opposed but my heart was already neck-deep. Something in me knew this man was my match. And I wasn't wrong. Despite our age difference, he led. He opened doors. He came to my defense at every implied opportunity. He was very, very traditional in his romantic views. Embracing my traditional views I'd long abandoned, I knew I had to confront him on the topic of children. He was talking marriage, and I was terrified he'd decide on wanting a family my body refused and eventually walk. So I put it to him very straight: I said I loved him, and although I would be hurt, I would completely understand were he to decide it was time to dissolve our relationship due to my age and potential inability to have a family, but that the time to do that had arrived, and to make this determination at some point in the future would result in fire and brimstone. He didn't waiver. He wanted to spend the rest of his life with me and we were married.
Women of my mother's bloodline going back the five generations I'm aware of have an unusual hardiness about them. They never die before 90. Some of them drank a beer a day before meeting their makers. Not a pacemaker nor wheelchair among them. The oldest one of them to give birth was 56. And she grew old enough to bury that little miracle when his time arrived. So when my husband approached me right after my 40th birthday to have a baby, I had two very loud voices in my head. One told me women over 30 have lapsing fertility, typically need medical help conceiving when over 35, and if successful run a risk of pregnancy and labor complications, as well as posing a risk to the unborn, not to mention the host of health issues to the young. The second voice said try, you know you can do this. And I did. I was pregnant within a few weeks and gave birth to a healthy baby who is now almost three.
So where is the part where I tell you to abandon convention and embrace tradition? Didn't I just literally follow the conventional path and win? Here's the thing: all of us over the age of 30 or 40 have things we wish we would have understood in our twenties. One thing I wish I had understood was that despite media advocating the unconventional, it was incredibly stupid and short-sighted of me to literally choose to ignore all of the traditional women advocating for their lifestyle as the one most supportive of a healthy and growing family. I thought they were uneducated provincial well-wishers who had yet to escape their hamlet of tradition. They're not. My story could have very easily turned into a story I didn't tell here because of it being entirely too sad and depressing to share. The only reason it didn't was an unusual combination of luck and genetics (and quite possibly the fact that I never took birth control pills, as we now are learning can affect fertility). It is because I shouldn't have what I have that I am both incredibly grateful and ardently passionate about conveying to all of you young women that thousands of years of evolution have done more to put us at an advantage for homemaking and motherhood than 50 years of media can unravel. I cannot believe I almost missed motherhood in an effort to fit into a mold built by modern media. I have evolved and grown in ways I'd never have imagined. I used to pray for strength. I now pray for selflessness. And most women now standing in the shoes I once wore WILL miss out on having families because they waited too long.
This story of mine stands the risk of sounding like something I don't want it to sound like: preachy condescending bs that is simply my experience. And after asked to write on this I contemplated a while to determine an approach that wouldn't sound this way. But then I decided to abandon the idea of an approach, and simply tell the story, hoping someone out there who is very similar to who I once was reads this and recognizes something in themselves before it's too late. It is because of the gratitude I have for what I barely had within my reach that I implore you to think on these things. I wish someone had insisted on the same when I was in my twenties. I almost missed everything.
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[–] luckylemon [S] 0 points 5 points 5 points (+5|-0) ago
I'm counting on it!