Let’s start from the beginning.
I never wanted a family. All I ever cared about was experiencing life, travelling, eating good food, enjoying my freedoms. A family wasn’t on my radar. I grew up in a chaotic environment. Shuffled around between homes and cities, between parents and grandparents. I never truly felt grounded, unless I was with my grandmother. It made me resilient but it didn’t attach me to any sort of place. It kept me moving.
Kids to me were a rock tethered to my ankle, screaming and kicking while I tried to live my life.
Naturally, as a 23 year old, I became a nanny to an 18 month old boy. In my search for freedom (driving and moving across the country for the summer in seek of something new and refreshing), I stumbled upon a summer job – half personal assistant for a B&B owner, and half nanny for her kid. I did everything in my power that summer to avoid changing a diaper. It was interesting. Not good, nor bad. Just… different. It didn’t unlock some mothering instinct in me and that was a relief at the time.
The next summer between semesters in my 2nd and 3rd years of university I went through a break up and needed a change. My dream was to travel. I had never left Canada, despite moving within the country many times, and driving across it twice the year before. This would be the year I ventured out into the great big world. But as a poor student, how was I going to do that?
Nanny.
Off I went to California to move in with a family I had never met, to care for their older children ages 8 and 12. Though the kids were great, it solidified my decision to be child free. I also met my husband there. My FIRST husband. After 2 years we were married and I moved countries to build a life in a new city.
That year I started getting questions from his family. “When will you have kids?”, “We’d love some grandchildren! You have to have at least one!”. I almost barfed up my lunch when I heard these questions.
Growing up in a “broken” family (let’s be real, it was a shit show, not just broken), I swore I’d never have kids and subject them to what I experienced. I never had the mothering instinct. I never saw the positives of kids of my own, or other peoples for that matter. I told my mother-in-law that it wasn’t happening. Not over my dead body. Let’s just say she wasn’t happy.
This wasn’t what ended my marriage at 28. In the end, a different country, miles from my friends and family was too much for me. Two months before our wedding I lost my sister in a car crash, and my life got flipped turned upside down. I wasn’t the person I was before. We didn’t grow together during that experience. We grew apart. I moved home to Canada (another new city, but closer to home), and we tried for a little while to bridge the gap emotionally. But in the end it was just too different to get back to what we had.
I still didn’t want kids.
After another couple of failed relationships, at the ripe age of 31, I had all but given up on finding my person. Then one night at 2am while enjoying a drunken debacle with my friends, I got a message on my online dating app. It was the last night of my 3 month online dating stint, I had made a decision to delete the apps that next day. I was intrigued but jaded. A massive message came through touching on everything I had written in my profile. I hadn’t seen this person before. We somehow crossed paths in a 8 hour window when he was incoming and I was outgoing. So begins the story of my now marriage.
We met and discussed our deal breakers. Our families. Our past. We had both lost our sisters within a year of each other. We had both been married and divorced within the same year and the same number of months. We shared all of our interests, including our intention to be child free for life.
Fast forward 5 years, a global pandemic and some hard thinking. Throw in a biological clock ticking (I was 36) and I realized I needed to really think about my future. I wasn’t getting any younger. I needed to at least consider whether a family was for me, before I didn’t have the choice anymore.
We debated, and talked the decision to death. We ended up firmly perched on the fence. We took a whole year to make the choice and at the end, still confused as ever, but changed by the world shutting down and our friends moving on from us with their own families, we decided to say screw it and go for it.
I still didn’t have maternal longings. I still thought I’d be a shit parent, having not had good role models for healthy marriage or a healthy household. But I had made a conscious decision to do my best because come hell or high water I was going to be a mom.
We started to dream. To imagine. To plan our lives around a possible pregnancy, timing it just right to fit with my job as a wedding photographer. February it was. We’d start trying in February…
But we needed to be married, right? I wanted to be married. So we decided on February, worked backwards and planned an elopement for September of 2021.
But we needed to get engaged, right? So we did that too.
We patiently awaited February while sharing our surprising news to try to grow our family with those who never imagined they’d hear those words from our mouths. We read all the books on trying and pregnancy. We were ready to do the damn thing.
The universe dared us to dream. Dream we did.