When Is The Right Time?

I married a guy who thinks and analyzes too much. Not terribly surprising, since I myself think and analyze too much.

I know he's thinking about it, so naturally I'm thinking about it too.

We want to have children. For a variety of reasons, we've had difficulty deciding when to have to children.

Initially, he wanted to wait until he was finished with school, which would be a few years away. His schedule will be very demanding, he'll probably be away from home for several days at a time, and he won't have a full time job to help support a family. I, on the other hand, will have a full time job, and I'm not sure if I can continue to work and take on primary responsibility for a child while Joe is both busy and broke. That's a lot of pressure for me.

But there's this problem with age. I've read that the chances of having problems with pregnancy increase significantly after age 35. Greater difficulty getting pregnant, greater likelihood of complications or miscarriage, greater chance of having a baby with birth defects or Downs Syndrome.

This really scares the crap out of me. Having complications with a pregnancy is one of my biggest fears. Always has been.

When Joe comes home from Iraq next year, I'll be 32. We want to have two children, and we want to wait a couple years in between. We are both acutely aware that we don't have much time to achieve this goal if we want to keep the odds in our favor.

On top of that, we both just really want to have kids as soon as possible. The birth of Joe's niece has had an impact on both of us. She's a tiny premature miracle. When I hold her, it makes me want to be a mother so badly. And Joe can't stop talking about how much he wants a baby.

We've talked about trying to get me pregnant when he comes home on leave. He gets two weeks off, but we don't know exactly when. We're hoping that if it all works out, I might be a few months along by the time his deployment is over.

But then there's the issue of our relationship. When Joe comes home, we will have been married for 1 year. Yet, we will only have spent a few days together as a married couple. A part of me wants to experience a married relationship without kids for a while. I want to take the time to adore my husband, to put him first, be spontaneous, take trips, have lots of sex, and just generally be in love. All the things we would be doing now if he wasn't on deployment.

Having a baby and becoming parents inevitably changes the relationship. I'm so totally excited for that change, but at the same time I can't help feeling that I might miss out life before that change.

So for all these reasons, I'm torn. And Joe is torn. We both want children so badly, but... when?

By waiting, he can go to school, we can have our relationship, and we get a few more years of not being tied down financially. But we also risk pregnancy complications, health problems for me, especially since I already several health issues, and we'd have to somehow suppress our longing for the family we both want so much.

I'd actually be pretty excited if I was pregnant right now, except for the part where Joe wouldn't be here to experience it with me or see the birth of his child.

A strong part of me just wants to wait and see what happens. If I get pregnant when Joe is home on leave, so be it. If I don't, that's okay too. I would honestly be happy either way.

And that's what I told him when I talked to him this evening. But he was still thinking about it... and that makes me think about it... and here I am blogging because I'm still thinking about it.

I don't want to wait. Yet I do. Yet I don't. Yet...

All of this analyzing for an event that is still so far away. We're a couple of worriers.