Skip to main content

Lets start at the beginning

 Life is "simple".. 

You go to school, you finish school; you go into work or into higher education and then into work; somewhere along the way you meet the partner of your dreams, fall in love and get married, and buy a house together. 

Once you've done all that, well, society dictates that two is not much of a crowd, and so you need to multiply your family numbers.

That has always been my understanding, and in many ways, desire. I'd even mapped out my major life events, and what age I expected to be when I achieved them. Lets see,

  • Finish school at age 16 - check
  • Sixth Form - check
  • University - check
  • Meet a fantastic woman - check
  • Somehow convince that fantastic woman that I was worth spending time with - A miracle, but check
  • Grade and get a job - Yup, that one too
  • Married by 25 - Okay, we were married a day before my 25th birthday, close enough!
  • Buy our first house together - Nailed it.
By November 2013 at the age of just 25, I was ripping through life's unlockable achievements, based on societal norms, I only had one "life goal" left to achieve. 

This isn't the 1970s any more though - 25 is too young for children; you need a career, and plenty of spare money to start expanding the family. Being married doesn't instantly mean you need to hit the procreation button, we can wait. 

My "plan" had always been to enjoy marriage for a couple of years, enhance my career to earn more money - kids are expensive after all, and what about all that pre-children travelling of the world that's absolutely worth doing?

I understood the importance of children, and I knew that I wanted them. However I was also given enough words of advice from existing parents of regrets they had about not doing this and that before they "settled down" so to speak. 

I suppose in my head my loose target was to see my first child's 18th birthday before my 50th, and my second (and probable final) child's 18th before my 55th birthday.

See - life is simple, I've been able to fit my life plan on a single page of a blog.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Not this time!

 I'm not going to lie - the first few weeks after our first 'attempt' were stressful. You know that the chances of first time conception are rare, but just over a third of couples conceive within the first month. 1 in 3, that is more than good enough odds for me to have hope. We've had friends, and have known about people conceiving on their first try, why can't that be us too? I don't like to think of myself as impatient, but those first few weeks dragged. You try and keep busy, but every third thought drifts off into parenthood of some kind; What if it worked? I wonder what the gender will be? You spend more time than you should calculating the birth date, which leads onto further thoughts of schooling - will they be young in their school year? Or old? What is better? Does it really matter? Should we have waited for the correct school-year birthday? No, that's just silly !  ...It's hard to rein your thoughts in.  During that first month, it was cle...
Post a Comment
Read more

Starting to feel isolated

 Rachel and I married when we were fairly young by modern standards; but that was by design. You see, I wanted to marry young, so that there would be plenty of time to have no-dependants fun, and we did as I explained in a previous post.  It was a couple of years or more after our marriage when our friends started to get married, and as the months and years went by after this, there seem to be one baby announcement after another. Don't get me wrong, I was always absolutely delighted to hear their news, and even more excited to meet the new member of their family, but each time the news broke, a bigger and bigger piece of me felt more isolated, and dare I say it, frustrated at my plight.  I could see the unease in Rachel's eyes each time a new baby announcement from friends was made, she knew that it would start "the conversation" again between us again. It usually did, and each time we would go around in circles, until we mutually agreed that it was best to "lea...
Post a Comment
Read more