skippy2 said:
Mine neice wants children now. She is 32 with a master's degree. The only job she could find was Kindergarten. Her boyfriend doesn't want kids and he has no career. He was disabled in a construction accident and can't work.
I think people make the mistake of thinking they have to wait till they can afford kids. That will never happen for a lot of people. Some people, like my niece are going to find out they waited too long.
I've seen that happen a lot around here myself. People say, "Oh, I can start a career out of college and work for a good 8 years, until I am 30 and by that time I should be in management, yada yada yada..." and then they find out at 30 they are infertile as a couple and have to start the long process of adoption, or that their career field hits a wall and they can't move up (to all my friends in IT, I salute you!) or they end up divorced by the time they wanted to have kids (not necessarily bad, but frustrating none the less).
When my wife and I married, we said we wanted to wait at least a year before we even
tried to start a family. But, we caught the bug early (after ten months we decided we wanted kids and better start, in case anything went wrong) and lucked out. On our second month of trying, one of the little guys scored a hit and nine months later we had our son. We waited another four years and then ended up with a girl.
If we had waited until our careers took off or until we could "afford" a child, we'd be childless still. The fact of the matter is you find a way. Our career paths are not at all what we had planned or hoped for. I was diagnosed Bipolar in 2000 and thanks to the medicines I have to take and the unpredictabuility of the illness, I'll probably have trouble holding any job for more than a year or two for the rest of my life. Good news is, if I don't have to be around "people" I can generally keep the stressors down and handle family duties. I can guarantee you if I had been diagnosed Bipolar before we had our first child and I had lived through all that I did those first two years, there is no way in heck I'd have started a family. I am so thankful, every day for my children and my wife. They give me something to be well for. They keep me focused outward and not inward.
I'm so lucky. Waiting to have kids can really lead to never having them at all, and that's fine for some people. God knows they'd get more vacations, have more money for extra luxuries and really get to be selfish with their spouse, but I'll take my kids over any vacation, any amount of money and all the time in the world. The first "daddy", the first "I love you", The kiss and hug when you least expect it but really needed it are all worth more than you or Bill Gates could pay me to pass them up.
