Friday, April 20, 2007

Changes....

My husband and I used to have motorcycles. We had always agreed that when I got pregnant, we would get rid of them. In September of last year, I got a BFP, and we sold mine right away (because yes, it was that awesome. The minute Aaron listed it - someone bought it). Aaron's didn't sell right away... and when we found the ectopic, I was hesitant to go though with it. Sure, we needed to money for other things. And yes - I'm hoping to get pregnant soon.

But selling that motorcycle made me feel 2 things.

First - I felt a pressure to get pregnant before the next motorcycle season arrived. Even though we had talked about it, and we were both ready to give up this hobby - I just felt like it me being pregnant was the only reason that we would get rid of them. I was nervous that he would be pissed off if the spring came and he saw all those motorcycles out there - and we sold his without a true reason. (This was another crazy Cece thought. We talked about it, and even though still no baby, our motorcycle riding days are over for now.).

Second - it's interesting to look back and see all of the decisions that we have made as a couple with the expectation that we would have a baby. The day we sold Aaron's motorcycle, his best friend called me all pissed off. He said that we were being ridiculous. That a baby shouldn't be your life, it should just be a part of your life. To some extent, I agree with that. But the motorcycles were just an obvious choice. The risk of death (or very serious injury) is very high when riding a motorcycle. And, with a baby comes changes in priorities. It's so interesting to me to look at the large life changing decisions that we have made without really saying out loud that it was because we were ready to add a baby into our lives. We got married when we were ready to start TTCing. We bought our house in a neighborhood that has a bunch of young families. The size of our house was built around the understanding that we wanted 2 children. We've even pushed off buying a new car because we know that we need a car with a 'way back' to accommodate both the dogs and the baby. I've stayed at a pretty stressful job because they have a great maternity policy here.

When I have my random freak-outs in which I wonder if I'm truly ready for a baby - all I need to do is to look at all of the changes that have happened over the past 3 years to get to where we are now. I am more ready than I ever thought I was.

3 comments:

Mary Ellen and Steve said...

I definitely understand where you're coming from. We feel like we have really built our lives around having a baby too. It makes it hard though when you have all of these "arrangements" and you wait, and wait and wait. I hope that all of your preparations pay off very soon.

Samantha said...

I understand where you are coming from. I too have made changes, passed up opportunities with the expectation that "next year I'll have a child." It just hasn't panned out. I think you do need to make lifestyle changes when you have kids, but all of these changes and sacrifices would feel much better if the kids were actually there!

Geohde said...

We've made minor changes, but pessimists that we are, we're waiting to be sure that:

A:we can get pregnant again (big question mark on this item),
B: it can go to term (usual sized question mark on this one), and
C: it doesn't have a fatal birth defect too (moderate sized question mark here) :(

We never even talked about names last time, and I was in the second trimester. That was before we knew anything was wrong, too.

Definitely pessimists!