“You know the problem… I’m going to tell you the problem…” insert sigh here from my new friend who I only partied with once before, “It’s just that all of our friends have kids and we just aren’t there yet, you know?”
I was sort of taken aback at this point. Imagine me in a kitchen, single me who is looking at this gorgeous girl who has the most perfect husband, (seriously, he is almost as cool as wolverine) and she is wiping down a countertop with her petite hand and she is lamenting the fact that her friends are pressuring her to have kids.
I looked in my red glass and wondered if someone had slipped me a mickey or a double shot of rohipnol. For some reason I thought there were only two worlds that humans live in, Single and Married. Yes, I know there is a divorced category but that don’t count because they did, at one time, fall into one of these two categories. However, there is a third category that seems to be almost as cruel as the single category and that is the “Married with Children” category.
Single people aren’t complete at all.
Married people are only partially complete.
Married with Children equals completedness.
I have to admit though, I felt a little bit better knowing that even after your married you still deal with peer pressure on some level. It made me not feel so alone in my singleness, like really, it doesn’t matter what stage you are at in life, you are always going to feel pressure from society to be better or more than what you currently are. I mean give it a rest already, just let people be.
Oh, I wanted to blog about this about 1 million times but I knew all of my friends who have kids would read it and take it wrong. We were married 3 years before we decided to have this baby, and you would not believe how incredibly weird everyone thought we were. Maybe because we are both in our 30′s, who knows. But I definitely felt weird and insane. It was difficult to have a conversation with friends when everyone is a new mom and you aren’t even really even sure you ever want kids. Then when we did decide to have kids it took me months and months to figure out if I was just doing it out of peer pressure or if it was a God thing. I am glad to hear that someone else feels that way. I never knew anyone felt that way except me/us and women who struggle with infertility…
We got all sorts of pressure to have kids right after we were married because there were no grandchildren on her side. It took us three years due to some medical issues, and once we had one, they then pestered us to have more. Sheesh.
It will always be a case of ‘The Jones’