(or family!)I've just read this on 2000 dollar wedding, and it resonated with me so much. I really relate to being torn between the ideas you develope growing up of what success means as a woman, and what it turns out you really want for yourself. Right up until I met Arthur I had no plans to ever get married, I imagined my self finding happiness through work, travel and my independence. I wasn't against having a family, it just didn't seem like something I would do. Oooh how that's changed.
I've just about come to terms with wanting to be a wife, after some strife, but that's not all of it. Now I've met the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, and that I'm madly in love with, I feel like I really want to have children NOW. I know, it's terrifying, I've gone utterly mad. I'm 23. I haven't even graduated yet. Dangerously, I think Arthur's gone equally mad. Don't get me wrong, some people are totally in the right place to have children early. There's nothing intrinsically mad about wanting children in your early twenties, or earlier, but it's just so far from what I expected from myself.
There are two streams of thought going on in my brain about this, usually simultaneously. In a way I'm really excited about having a family, and just really happy that we've found each other and we're going to do this together. On the other hand I feel really torn. I know it's not the sensible thing to jump into having children when we have no money, no permanent home, and not so steady jobs. I also feel a little bit bad for wanting children so soon. I (whisper this) feel like I should really make a 'success' of my life first, and show that I can do more than just be a mother. I know it's awful, what on earth do I mean 'just be a mother', I mean really. But on the other hand I really want to just have babies! The other thing is that there's so many things we want to do that will be much harder once we have children; travel, moving about, who knows... So many thoughts, so little order!
But the urge to have children just isn't rational. I s'pose you could even talk about some kind of evolutionary imperative argument. It's very strange feeling something so strongly that I don't rationally want (right now). Even less rationally there's a little voice in the back of my head saying, 'what if you wait and then you can't have children?'. I think I genuinely have a phobia of infertility, and that's making me want to start trying soon, in case it takes much longer than we might think. Odd. Odd. Odd.
It's sometimes hard to reconcile these traditional female roles of wife and (hopefully) mother with what I've thought of as my identity, and I'm fairly sure that's what's causing these yoyo thought processes. I s'pose you could say I'm a pretty staunch feminist after all. But clearly there's something in me that wants to be those people, and have those things too. Beating myself up about isn't going to help though, I think I need to just be okay with wanting it both ways. And maybe I can have it both ways, who knows. People are rarely as easily put into boxes as we'd like them to be, including ourselves. I might want to see myself as a (tongue in cheek) independent woman, but independence can be lonely, and I suppose I'm only just learning that I'm a family kind of person too.
It's interesting discovering new parts of myself, and going through the process of getting married has prompted a lot of this self discovery. As much as I sometimes feel a bit angsty about the whole thing it's still exciting moving into a different stage of my life, what ever that stage holds.
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