My brain works in such a mysterious way sometimes, that it’ll just throw little brain teasers at me every now and then. One that I’ve recently had is ‘is there a right time to start a family?’. Which got me thinking.
I’d always known I wanted kids, and that I wanted to be a fairly young parent, having grown up with young parents myself. That was about the extent of my thoughts on it, I didn’t really have a solid plan of any sorts. Mark was even less decisive of that, up until about the age of around 33/34, Mark believed he didn’t want children at all.
Mark and I getting together meant that we’d had the occasional chat about it, whether it was something we both wanted and other details that come up with that type of conversation. After we got engaged we spoke more on the subject and decided that after we’d gotten married we would try for a baby.
Little did we know, at the time of having this discussion I was already pregnant.
When I eventually figured out I was pregnant, and not suffering with a 2 month long hangover it threw me off a bit. Although we’d had the discussion, was now the right time for us to have a baby? We’d just moved across the country, we’d just gotten engaged and were both enjoying life as it was. So were we ready to have this baby?
(Obvious spoiler alert : we now have a nearly 2 year old, so the answer was yes). After thinking it through and discussing everything with Mark, we both decided that although it wasnt necessarily what we had planned, we were both thrilled regardless and that clearly life had decided that right then was indeed the right time.
I think deciding when to have a family is a very subjective and personal choice, I’ve seen people decided that being teen parents is the right choice for them and I’ve seen people that are in the later stages of life decide that actually they do want children. There are people who want a child even if they are single, or in a polygamous relationship. You could be at any stage in your walk of life. I think that at the end of the day, if you decide to have a baby or adopt, foster or anything along those lines, if you feel it’s the right time for you and you can wholeheartedly love and support a child then does it really matter when you decide that time comes?
Let us know if you think there’s a right time to start a family!