Is She Having a Baby?

Just a few weeks after my husband and I moved to Boulder, we met an awesome married couple that we knew were going to be lifelong friends. Five seconds later, the wife was pregnant. A few months later, I got a great new job at a small, fifteen-person advertising agency. On the first day, I learned that two of the five women working at the office were pregnant. I started receiving a weekly phone call or email from my mother telling me about all the girls I went to high school with that were still living in and around my hometown that were pregnant. There was a six-week break where I thought I had finally escaped baby fever, and then Best Friend #2 called with some unexpected news. Ta-da! She was pregnant. Two weeks later my husband returns home from work to tell me the woman that works for him is expecting twins. Then there were baby showers and new mother lunches. My head was swirling in pink and blue and baby powder and diapers. For the love of birth control, people! What’s in the water? Can everyone stop having babies, please? Why must the world reproduce?

I’ve talked (read: whined and complained) about this phenomenon to several non-childbearing friends and the response I always receive is “welcome to your thirties.” Really? I thought being thirty was all about releasing my uncomfortable, childish twenties and embracing the adult freedom of my newfound maturity. Now that I’m here, I’ve got the pressure of reproduction to look forward to for the next ten years? No fair! I don’t wanna! You can’t make me!

Okay, okay. I’m not blind to the fact that women have babies around the age of thirty. It’s just that I have no strong feeling one way or the other on the idea of having a baby or not having a baby. My husband and I have had a couple of wine-induced chats about our idyllic life as parents, pushing around our couture-clad kid in a Bugaboo stroller. Then we wake up hung-over and immediately change our minds. Not because we think it’s too hard, it just doesn’t feel like this decision is in the cards for us at the moment, and I don’t want to be made to feel bad that it isn’t.

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Comments

Men are definitely pressured to have male heirs to "carry on the family name" (as if there aren't thousands of other people with the same last name!). When I was in my 30s, my husband and I were often asked by (nosy) people when we would start a family. If I truthfully replied we weren't having any, I was often told my decision was "selfish." Wierd. I believe a lot of the baby making that goes on during that decade of life is related to hormones - Mother Nature's push to keep the species going. Many of my friends were undecided like Sarah until one day when, as though a switch had been thrown, babies were all they could think about. It never happened to me, and I'm glad. I think children are happiest in families that would want them even without the hormones. I feel sorriest for children of parents who felt compelled to have them to suit someone else's need. Every child should be able to grow up wanted and loved.

Yes, I remember those years in my 30s very clearly. The whole world was ovulating to beat their biological time clock, and I had neglected to wind mine. I was never baby-crazed, but now that I am 40+ and single again I am thankful that I held back when I was unsure and did not succumb to society's expectation. The ironic thing is that my current significant other is an embryologist who's career is founded on fertilization. For the first time in my life, I am dating a man where I do not care how many other women he gets pregnant!! LOL!! We've had the tough conversations about our relationship -- the expectations. He was very wary in the beginning of our relationship, because a large part of his practice is getting older (36+) woment pregnant when that biological clock has begun to wind down. It took more than one super-serious conversation for him to fully grasp that I am OK *not* having kids.

Oddly enough, there is pressure brought to bear on many men who are in serious relationships to consider having children as part of that union. And I don't necessarily mean from the women to whom they are married or otherwise involved with, though that certainly does occur. I am my father's only son (I have two sisters) and I know he has been disappointed not to have had any grandchildren from me, especially a male child. He's 80 and I'm in my fifties. He has not baldly taken me to task for not providing an heir who would carry on the family name, as it were, but he has a parent's way of alluding to certain issues that can raise the spectre of guilt, if not actually try to make me feel guilty. When my mother was alive she was much more vocal about wanting me to have children. I have been a step-dad and truly enjoyed the experience, but I'm wondering if other of your male readers felt pressured to have children from others outside their marriage? Loved the story!

Sarah, keep writing the articles. love them :) SYT

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