My best friend Jamie wanted to know, "How you really, personally, feel about having kids (your thoughts as of right now)".
That is John and I with Haylee the Goddaughter of Awesome (can you believe she was that itty bitty!?!) On more than one occasion she has been mistaken as ours. Including the day we moved into this apartment. A few days later a neighbour stopped by to see how we were settling and and wondered how the baby was handling the transition to the new place. What did I say? "What baby?" The woman was horrified. I then quickly enlightened her that the little one she saw was not ours but the wee one was in fact my goddaughter. Haylee along with our sponsor child Alexis is the closest things John and I have to children right now. I wanted to make that clear first.
Second thing I want to make clear is that the day John and I got married we entered into an agreement. We agreed to wait 5 years to figure out the whole kid thing. We would re-evaluate in 5 years. Why 5 years? It seemed like a good number of year. Not to long not to short. Long enough to figure out this marriage thing but not to long that there would be increased concerns about pregnancy later in life.
As of right now I like the idea of having children but that's where it ends. I like the idea of children. I like the idea of having a little one to not only enrich our lives but also to start our family AND to provide Haylee with a lifelong playmate. Can you imagine the insanity and chaos that would ensue if our child and Haylee got up to shennanigans?!
I want to have kids, I really do. I can't imagine having kids with anyone else other than John. However now is not the time for me to have kids. It's really not. I'm still to selfish with my time, my money, my husband, my life. I want to eventually share my life with a wee one. A little Warkentin-Hammell hybrid would absolutely rock my world. I know it would rock a lot of peoples worlds. But now is not the time. I know that you can never ever be fully prepared to have a child. I know that. However I'm not in the right place in my life to feel like it would be fair to a little one to bring it into the world. When you have a child your whole world and life becomes that child and I'm just not ready to do that just yet.
I think part of this comes from me not being ready to settle down just yet. John and I talked about buying a house briefly. Then we talked about living overseas extensively. We talked briefly about perhaps buying a condo. Then we talked at length about taking time out of life and going down to Paraguay and helping out Melita. I'm not ready just yet to settle down and neither is John.
I also have reservations regarding my health and pregnancy. First of all I'm a prime candiate for Postpartum depression. That is a major thing to consider. Another would be that we need to figure out a few things about me first. One being that I could have blood clotting issues (Factor 5 Leiden) it's a major possibility for me as we've recently found out my mother has it. She's probably lived with it all her life be didn't realize it until it reared its ugly head in June. That is something we need to get figured out first. Do I have factor 5 or not. Another thing to find out is if I have neurofibromatosis. My mother and brother has this. Unfortunately it's one of those conditions where not much is known and I have a 50/50 chance of being a carrier even if I don't have the condition myself. A simple genetic test will figure that out. A blood test will figure the other one out. These are major concerns for us.
So the verdict is I want kids, I would love love love to have kids. Just not right now. I love the idea of having kids. But loving the idea of kids is not a good enough reason to bring kids into the world. Kind of like being in love with the idea of being in love isn't a good enough reason to get married.
When the time comes John and I will have beautiful brilliant wonderful amazing full of awesome Warkentin-Hammell hybrids. They will be smart, creative, sarcastic, strawberry blondes with German stubborness and Irish tempers. But until that day comes John and I will continue to think up bizarre names of these ficitional children. Or at least try to think of something that sounds good with Warkentin as a middle name and Hammell as a last name. It's not an easy feat! There is a reason there are a lot of John's, Jacob's and Jack's in our families.
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