This morning I saw a video blog post on one of my favorite knitting blogs where the lovely gal who runs the blog informed us followers that she and her husband are expecting their first baby. How exciting for them!
My cousin just had her first baby a few weeks ago. Friends from college are definitely having kids at an alarming rate, and two of my co-workers who are in their late 20s are also pregnant.
I'm genuinely happy for these friends and acquaintances. Adding a baby to your family is a really happy, exciting, fun event, and kids are pretty much the greatest entertainment ever (except if you've ever seen my fostercat Tasha play fetch; that trumps a kid any day).
But on behalf of those of us who are single, in their late 20s/early 30s and have no plans or desire to have kids any time soon, I'm begging you: please stop. You're making us look bad.
While I was married, the plan for my husband and I was to have kids around my age 28-30 (which, at that time was like 6 years in the future). Whenever we brought this up around my parents, they'd cry, "We're too young to be grandparents! Don't have kids yet!" And then, of course, the year I got divorced, I started hearing this from my parents: "Ohhh, all our friends have grandkids!" And it wasn't a tone of joy. It was a tone of wistfulness. And a little bit of disappointment.
To that, I now reply, "Get a freaking dog."
Look, some of us who will be turning 30 in 2012 (unless the world ends before my birthday, in which case HA HA I BEAT THE SYSTEM) and all we want to do is get drunk on a Friday night and jump around to "Jump Around" until we get that puke-y feeling and have to lay down and then get terrible hangovers in the morning that necessitate eating three Dunkin' Donuts and then watch Doctor Who all day. And we don't want to have to feel guilty about those decisions because our peers are having babies and driving Volkswagen Touaregs (yeah right, no one I know drives these) and budgeting and buying sidewalk chalk in bulk.
I'll let you in on a little secret: sometimes I want kids. And sometimes I'm like NOPE. Which is a damn good indication that I'm not ready to have a child. I'm glad I know this. I just wish that this decision (or lack thereof) didn't carry with it societal and cultural judgment that I'm somehow lazy, or too unattractive/weird/whatever to find a life partner to have kids. I'm okay with where I am in my life, and considering I'm a productive member of society, I think you can just GET OFF MY FREAKING BACK, TRADITIONAL EXPECTATIONS.
The fact that I just posted this to my blog probably makes me a little bit crazy, but you know what? That's okay, because I don't have worry that my little craziness means that someone's going to call DCFS on me. It just makes me a little bit of a crazy cat lady. And I'm okay with that, too.
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