I suspected this would happen soon. Where I’m from, a woman doesn’t hit 25 with no marriage prospects and get away with it without intense scrutiny. I have a feeling mine has just begun. <\/p>\n
Exhibit A:<\/b> We’re sitting around the living room, channel surfing, when my mom goes, “You know, I was just thinking. I was your age \u2014 no, I was 23! \u2014 when I met your dad and got married.” I saw where she was going, so I finished the train of thought for her: “Yep, and you were my age when you had me.” She lit up. “Yep!” she said, smiling. I told her I couldn’t imagine how she had handled all that in her mid-twenties (she already had my sister by then). And truly, I think it’s a miracle that she did. Would I be able to do what she did? No. <\/p>\n
Exhibit B:<\/b> While at the bank drive-thru, the teller passed a photo of her baby to my dad, who passed it around the truck to my mom and my grandmother and me. My grandmother showed it to me and said, “Awww, doesn’t this make you want one?” No. <\/p>\n
Exhibit C:<\/b> As I was getting ready to leave and drive back to Memphis and I was explaining to my mom about having to pick up my key from Phil, my mom said, with a hint of disappointment, “So, you and Phil are never going to get married, are you?” No. <\/p>\n
Every day I wonder about how that part of my life is going to pan out. When I was in high school, I wanted to do it like my mom had done it (sans having kid No. 1 at 17): Marry at 23, breed at 25. I’m not sure at what point it became crystal clear to me that my life trajectory wasn’t going to resemble those of the women in my formative community. All I know is that the longer I wait to move toward settling down, the less I actually want to make that leap. <\/p>\n
Still, I feel the slightest pangs of trepidation and regret; I feel like there is a hole in our family that could be neatly and sweetly filled by new life. I feel like I should \u2014 if I am going to at all \u2014 have a child while my only remaining grandparent is still alive, and while my own parents are still in relatively good health. But those aren’t great reasons to have kids, especially when you’re deathly afraid of childbirth and imparting your neurotic impulses to a defenseless little fleshy tabula rasa. And you’re not sure who exactly you’d want to breed with. And you sneeringly refer to having kids as “breeding.”<\/p>\n
See, it’s all wrong right now. I don’t know if it will ever be right. I suspect the timing will be all off no matter when it actually happens. It usually is. But I’m hoping the family will lay off me, or maybe start pestering my brother to propagate our genes. It’s time; he’s nearly twenty*.<\/p>\n
*denotes mild sarcasm<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I suspected this would happen soon. Where I’m from, a woman doesn’t hit 25 with no marriage prospects and get away with it without intense scrutiny. I have a feeling mine has just begun. Exhibit A: We’re sitting around the living room, channel surfing, when my mom goes, “You know, I was just thinking. I was your age \u2014 no, I was 23! \u2014 when I met your dad and got married.” I saw where… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-its-true--im-crazy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-lH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1345\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}