How is Babby Formed?
Jul. 26th, 2009 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
celeste_noelaniIan and I had been tossing around the idea of kids for a couple of years now. We discussed it off an on for pretty much our entire relationship, mostly because I knew that I wasn't sure if I wanted to be done having kids or not, and I thought it was really important that I let Ian know that. I was also pretty certain that he was dead set against having kids, so I kept wanting to find out if this was actually the case sooner rather than later, because I didn't want to talk about getting married or anything like that if we were decidedly on different sides of the fence regarding children. Turns out, we were both avid fence hoppers, only truly agreeing when we met in the middle of that big, scary subject of PROCREATING.
Our talk was mostly confined to the realm of tentative banter, and we always found a way to postpone any actual discussion. However, talk got far more serious a couple of years ago after we visited Ian's family for his annual Thanksgiving trip. Ian's sister had just delivered her second child six weeks earlier, and being in the same house as a newborn put me into Baby Overdrive. I let Ian know as early as I could, and in no uncertain terms. One night, as we were hitting the sack in the Mother-In-Law above his sister's garage, I looked at him and said "Okay, just so you know, Fay broke me. This whole baby thing? We need to figure it out STAT."
I will always give Ian credit for doing the quintessential Ian thing. Instead of screaming, bursting into flames or trying to distract me with sex and / or food, he simply smiled, nodded and said "Okay." We started to talk about it a very little bit right then, but we decided it would be best to just enjoy the rest of the trip and sit down and really Figure Shit Out when we got home. (See? Postponing again!)
We discussed the pros and cons of babies, adopted older children, vasectomies and tubal ligations, so deeply and so often that it all became one long conversation, never ending, only beginning again when one of us would say out of the blue "but if we did decide to..." and then launch us back into it all over again. And still, that fence we met on all the time? It's BIG, people, and it's comfortable. And so there we were most of the time, meeting in the middle of "Oh, hell if I know what I want to do."
Then two things happened at the end of March that brought our discussions home. First, Ian's dad ran into some medical troubles. As much as he doesn't ever want to move back to Houston, Ian loves his family dearly and has wonderful relationships with all of them. He and his dad were sometimes on the phone several times a day during Dwight's ordeal, which really made an impression on me. Right about that time, I finally got my IUD taken out, a month earlier than we expected. Secretly, or not so secretly, I was elated. Petrified, and feeling sort of guilty for feeling elated, but still. Elated.
Ian. Was. Panicking. We thought we had another month to Really Really Talk About IT and I Mean it This Time, but all of a sudden we were left with no IUD and a prescription for birth control pills that I wanted to talk about started taking them.
Eventually, the skinny boiled down to this: Ian was pretty freaked out, and I felt completely zen. We were literally trying to wrap our heads about the possibility of making a baby right then and there. And either in my wisdom or in my stupidity, I took a breath and told him all the things that made me feel so right about this.
"I don't want to try and make a baby," I told him. "I don't ever want that to take over our lives. It may never happen for us, and if that's how life is going to be, then it's a good life, and I'm happy. And if we make a baby, I want it to be because we were making love and enjoying one another, and having exactly the relationship that we have right now."
If we had a baby, I thought, I wanted it to be because we let it happen, not because we made it happen.
I also reminded him that yes, I do know that neither one of us are really "baby" people. But if we have a baby, it wouldn't stay a baby for very long at all. Neither would it stay a toddler, or a school ager or a teenager or even in our house. What it would stay, and what it would always be would be family. Our family. Family that we would be able to reach out to in 40 years when we were faced with some medical crisis and they would love us, and we would love them.
"What if you weren't able to be there for your dad right now?" I asked him. "Yeah, I know he has friends and other people he can call. But he's calling you. And you are talking to him for however long it takes. What if you weren't here because he didn't want to have a baby?"
That's a little shortsighted.
Our talk was mostly confined to the realm of tentative banter, and we always found a way to postpone any actual discussion. However, talk got far more serious a couple of years ago after we visited Ian's family for his annual Thanksgiving trip. Ian's sister had just delivered her second child six weeks earlier, and being in the same house as a newborn put me into Baby Overdrive. I let Ian know as early as I could, and in no uncertain terms. One night, as we were hitting the sack in the Mother-In-Law above his sister's garage, I looked at him and said "Okay, just so you know, Fay broke me. This whole baby thing? We need to figure it out STAT."
I will always give Ian credit for doing the quintessential Ian thing. Instead of screaming, bursting into flames or trying to distract me with sex and / or food, he simply smiled, nodded and said "Okay." We started to talk about it a very little bit right then, but we decided it would be best to just enjoy the rest of the trip and sit down and really Figure Shit Out when we got home. (See? Postponing again!)
We discussed the pros and cons of babies, adopted older children, vasectomies and tubal ligations, so deeply and so often that it all became one long conversation, never ending, only beginning again when one of us would say out of the blue "but if we did decide to..." and then launch us back into it all over again. And still, that fence we met on all the time? It's BIG, people, and it's comfortable. And so there we were most of the time, meeting in the middle of "Oh, hell if I know what I want to do."
Then two things happened at the end of March that brought our discussions home. First, Ian's dad ran into some medical troubles. As much as he doesn't ever want to move back to Houston, Ian loves his family dearly and has wonderful relationships with all of them. He and his dad were sometimes on the phone several times a day during Dwight's ordeal, which really made an impression on me. Right about that time, I finally got my IUD taken out, a month earlier than we expected. Secretly, or not so secretly, I was elated. Petrified, and feeling sort of guilty for feeling elated, but still. Elated.
Ian. Was. Panicking. We thought we had another month to Really Really Talk About IT and I Mean it This Time, but all of a sudden we were left with no IUD and a prescription for birth control pills that I wanted to talk about started taking them.
Eventually, the skinny boiled down to this: Ian was pretty freaked out, and I felt completely zen. We were literally trying to wrap our heads about the possibility of making a baby right then and there. And either in my wisdom or in my stupidity, I took a breath and told him all the things that made me feel so right about this.
"I don't want to try and make a baby," I told him. "I don't ever want that to take over our lives. It may never happen for us, and if that's how life is going to be, then it's a good life, and I'm happy. And if we make a baby, I want it to be because we were making love and enjoying one another, and having exactly the relationship that we have right now."
If we had a baby, I thought, I wanted it to be because we let it happen, not because we made it happen.
I also reminded him that yes, I do know that neither one of us are really "baby" people. But if we have a baby, it wouldn't stay a baby for very long at all. Neither would it stay a toddler, or a school ager or a teenager or even in our house. What it would stay, and what it would always be would be family. Our family. Family that we would be able to reach out to in 40 years when we were faced with some medical crisis and they would love us, and we would love them.
"What if you weren't able to be there for your dad right now?" I asked him. "Yeah, I know he has friends and other people he can call. But he's calling you. And you are talking to him for however long it takes. What if you weren't here because he didn't want to have a baby?"
That's a little shortsighted.
We looked at one another for awhile. Ian smiled.
"Have you ever considered a career in law?" he asked. And then he kissed me like he meant it.
That was at the end of March. By the end of May, we were expecting. And we are both very, very excited.
