The Baby Talk Deal: how my 23-year-old self sold me out
I thought I’d be a different person by now. When I think about myself as a kid and what I expected my life to be like as an adult, I guess I thought things would be … different. I didn’t have any sort of tangible, explainable idea of the exact life I would live, I never had 2.5-kids-white-picket-fence delusions of grandeur. And overall I think if my teenage self could’ve seen me now, she’d be pretty happy with where I’ve ended up so far.
And yet in the last few months I’ve been thinking a lot about how I just expect that one day I’ll wake up and be someone different - someone more adult, more mature. I still look at my friends who are a few years older than me and think - when I get to that point, I’ll totally have it all together. But I’ve been thinking that for years now and I have not managed to accumulate any sense of said “togetherness.” At lest I don’t feel like I have.
On the flip side I have sensed a change in myself over the last few years. I’m much more confident in my own skin, less insecure, willing to claim for myself what I want out of life. And those are good feelings - but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m pretty sure my 23-year-old self sold me out when she agreed to have The Baby Talk at 28. Then, 28 seemed like a lifetime away and I was sure - given my theory on togetherness mentioned above - that I would have it all figured out by then. Surely, as I rapidly approached my thirties, I would be a different person.
I’d like to bitch-slap my 23-year-old self for making that deal.
Ok, not entirely because truth be told I have grown up since then - I can tell because having a hypothetical talk about possibly one day having a family doesn’t reduce me to nausea, tears and screams as it used to (hence, why I made The Deal). Still, I guess at 23 I expected to feel differently about things by now, to be ready to at least talk about an impending family.
For me, the idea of having a family - however that looks for us (I’m SOOOO not sold on the idea of pregnancy and biological kids) - has been a series of logical rationales: I know in the future that I want to have a family, I want to have that life experience, so at some point a decision needs to be made about kids. (Unless, as we joke about, we decide to adopt a 17-year-old and just put them through college :-)). Lest I be one of those old Pac Heights “i-can’t-tell-if-you’re-a-mom-or-grandma” parents, our early-to-mid 30’s seemed like an ok time to start a family. So giving ourselves a couple years to make decisions and come up with a plan made 28 the magic year to have The Baby Talk. Or so we thought when we were 23.
Ryan turns 28 this month. And I’m pretty sure I’m not going to become a different person in the next few weeks. There’s a good chance we’ll postpone The Talk but it’s still given me pause to think about how I regard the future and I’m grasping more and more that I’m living my future NOW. Sure, I’m a different person than I was at 23 but a). it didn’t happen over night and b). the fundamentals of my personality are still the same. When I made The Deal, it was based on the hope that I’d wake up one day suddenly wanting kids.
I still have that hope - and it could still happen - but what I think is more likely (as I get older and yet not more maternal) is that we’ll make whatever decision we make based not on emotion and a burning desire for kids, but based on a factual timeline we lay out. That’s different than what I expected based on the way all this is perceived in our culture, but based on each of our personalities I should’ve expected as much. And since my future is now, I should probably just embrace it.
I’ve hesitated about blogging on all this because it’s kind of a touchy subject for me, but I’ve so appreciated the honesty of my friend as she’s gone through this process (and just became a mom!) with similar sentiments that I decided to go for it - who knows how many more of us are lurking out there …
August 03 2010 08:42 am | family and marriage and san francisco and the city
August 3rd, 2010 at 9:12 am
You have a gift for writing, Alexis.
So you sort of alluded to it, but your family planning will involve adopting?
Oh — and it’s quite a lurking subject for a lot of folks I’m sure. The Elephant in the Room! :)
August 3rd, 2010 at 11:03 am
Thanks! And thanks for commenting!
Yah, as of now, we are planning on adopting when the time comes. Not sure about biological kids yet …
August 3rd, 2010 at 6:52 pm
I know exactly how you feel! I’m not sure I agree on the factual timeline idea, or maybe I just don’t want to accept it. I guess it’s always inevitable when making important decisions.
I’m considering adoption one day too, and you can’t avoid planning for that. Confession: I’ve always hoped it would just happen to me one day and I wouldn’t have to decide. How mature of me….
August 3rd, 2010 at 8:54 pm
love it! it seems so sterile to go: ok, well, if i want to have adult kids when i’m in my 50’s, i’ll need to do something about the whole kid situation sometime in my 30’s … sooo …
i’ve always been far, FAR, FAAAAAR from hoping it would just “happen” - to the point of disturbing paranoia; i can’t watch movies/shows about unplanned pregnancy, etc. and i literally had a full-blown melt down after watching Knocked Up (talk about mature) … but i digress. like i said, i’m still holding out hope that one day i’ll wake up with entirely different feelings. it could happen but i’m learning to accept rationality in absence of emotionality. it comes with it’s own issues, too, but it is what it is.
i still frequently think about our conversation on pregnancy, kids and selfishness. i started writing about it, actually, in this post, but that was a little deeper than i wanted to go at this point! can’t i just adopt an adult child when i’m old? then we can skip all this drama. :-)
(thanks for reading!)
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