I read with interest – and a bit of sadness – the following article from The Free Press: “What I’ve Learned From Watching People Wait to Have Children” by maternal-fetal medicine physician Sarah Poggi (the article is behind a paywall, but you can read a condensed version on Instagram).
As the title suggests, Poggi describes the hardships and devastation she’s witnessed firsthand by caring for “advanced gestational” patients who waited until age 35 or older to start having children. Many women learned the hard way that egg freezing and IVF are not the solutions they were promised as they put off marriage and family to build their careers.
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Of course, not everyone who had children upwards of 35 did so for that reason. In my case, infertility, marriage problems, and money problems made the perfect storm for delaying children. During that time, with circumstances seeming hopeless and beyond repair, I convinced myself I never wanted a family, anyway.
There’s no shortage of TikTok videos and celebrities making the case for why the child-free life is better: more freedom, sleep, money, and overall, sanity. We (Americans, anyway) live in a society that is very anti-child.
I let these thoughts permeate deep in my mind, and surrounded myself with people who felt the same. But some funny things happened with time: I finally got help for my alcoholism and depression, Josh found a stable job that allowed us to stop living paycheck to paycheck, our marriage started to improve, and I sought help for my infertility.
The “child-free” friends I had? Some of them changed their minds and went on to have kids. People change as they get older…imagine that.
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As I enter the final weeks of pregnancy, it’s not lost on me that it could have been a lot easier on my body if we’d done this sooner. Perhaps I wouldn’t have gestational diabetes. But then, the circumstances we found ourselves in were mostly beyond our control. I was not in the right frame of mind, nor was my body healthy enough, to care for a dependent being when I struggled to take care of myself.
Could a surprise pregnancy have forced me to sober up and mature a lot faster? Probably. But in God’s perfect timing, I am the healthiest I’ve ever been, spiritually as well as physically, past the age of 35. I remind myself that there are plenty of “geriatric moms” in the Bible.
I hold the tension of wishing I’d been able to have babies sooner, while also being grateful that my children will be raised by the woman I am today, as opposed to five years ago.
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Poggi writes to emphasize a crucial point: it’s better to have kids sooner rather than later, if possible. The wisdom of “what time is the best time?” is highly subjective (I’d recommend sobering up before trying to get pregnant, if that’s a struggle for you). But I also believe from experience that this phantom “right time” doesn’t actually exist for most people. You will always be able to convince yourself that you don’t have enough time or money for a child. The world has never, ever been completely safe to raise a family. To wait on those things is to wait forever.
There’s a healthy kind of pressure that parenthood puts on you to start prioritizing and making better choices right now, rather than years down the road. People underestimate how resilient they can be, how quickly they can adapt to change (my first four-hour stretch of sleep with a newborn was magical, I tell you).
But no one was more surprised than me to learn just how much joy can be had even when you’re the most exhausted you’ve ever been. The bitter and the sweet can coexist, and the former makes the latter that much better.
Photo by Arren Mills on Unsplash
