Ready or not

I am supposed to be “self evaluating” for the year-end performance process… Wonder if “Manage, monitor and maintain the development of a human being” qualifies as taking on additional responsibility!

Anyway, you were given sufficient warning in the previous post about how I was switching gears to write about pregnancy. If my pregnancy does not interest you, now is the time to close this blog and read something else… may I suggest highheelconfidential.com – go check it out, I won’t mind… promise :-) (psst.. I am hooked on to that website myself)

Ok… so where do I begin? Let’s see… What is the number one question folks have asked me after I shared the “news”? Was it planned? The thought that instantly comes to my mind is... Does it really matter? Now that I am in this situation it’s too late to back out even if it was unplanned.

Seriously, I don’t think I would ever have been 100% ready. I could not picture myself longing to start a family, be a mother and all that. Three years ago, one of our friends announced that they were expecting a baby… while I was genuinely happy and overjoyed for them… their news only reinforced my belief that I was not ready for that journey yet. Over the next few years, as I saw more friends and peers stepping in to parenthood…. I used to wonder, is a baby really necessary for me? Am I ready to shoulder the biggest responsibility in my life? Well, once you are married it’s not just “me”, “my decision” anymore. I posed the question to V… We had a lengthy discussion about that question, many others and something else that was nagging me…. Is it a selfish desire to want to have one’s own baby while there are so many abandoned children and babies out there?

At the end of that discussion, it was clear that V was more ready than me to start a family of our own. He was convinced and totally enthusiastic that I brought the topic up. “Don’t you want to see a part of yourself in a person, an opportunity to mould and shape a young mind, to be a positive influence in a person’s life…” he said all that with a lot of josh… It made me feel quite guilty, I had never thought about it that way… Am I the selfish one here who’d rather shirk responsibility and live a life according to me with no worries? So I took another stab at the question. Do I see myself not needing a family forever? May be I don’t see the need for a kid now, may be I don’t see the need when I am 40, but as I grow older, I am sure that I would miss the fact that I don’t have a family. As is the case with me always, I would long for something when it’s too late ;-) I realized that I was looking at the decision of starting a family from a short-term angle.

Was I ready then? No. Would I've been ready in two years, five years… may be ten? I don’t think I’d ever be fully ready. Having a baby, being responsible for shaping the life of a child, is a huge deal and I would always be apprehensive about the big change, no matter how old I was. If I knew something for certain it was that life couldn’t just be V & me always… Then, does it really matter if we decide to go ahead and take the plunge now or five years later? I decided to close my eyes, hold my breath and take the plunge…

There you go short question “Was this planned” and a very long answer. I don’t know about planned or not planned but I can definitely say that a lot of thought was put in to it :-)