When is it an OK time to get pregnant?
It's funny how this question is persistent through all periods of history. It could be medieval, turn of the century, the roaring twenties, the civil rights era or the pandemic days and we are still fearful of motherhood.
The question we ask is when is it a good time to get pregnant. What we really want to know is when is it a good time to be a Mom. Or even, when is it a good time to give up my career. Or even, when is it a good time to opt out of my personal goals. This seems pretty harsh to note, but somehow motherhood has become equivalent to “giving up” as opposed to “adding to”. And yes, I am writing this from my very very privileged perch of being a mother to children who are now 9 and 12 years old. I can hear your incessant sighs of, “you have already been through the worst of it”. Or even, “hindsight is 20/20”. You are wrong. I know as I know the back of my hand that the worst is not behind me as my children enter adolescence. I also know that I don't know, what I don't know. I have never been the mother to adolescent children and I won’t even pretend that I know what the future will entail. I can say though that I have it under control. Why am I able to say this? It’s simple. I know things will be ok, if I say that they are ok. I believe in my ability to pivot at a drop of a dime. I believe that I control my reactions and I control my action steps. So whatever problem that is created in which I have to make a decision, I believe that I will make that decision in spite of the feelings that it brings in the moment.
I recently had a conversation with a 25 year old woman, lets call her Savannah who during the pandemic found herself (and I use “found” loosely) in a situation where she was pregnant by her boyfriend and simultaneously was given a job offer where she would have to move 900 miles away. I will put things in perspective for you. Savannah is in the top 3% of income earners in the country. She has all the raw material needed to become very successful in her industry. What is the dilemma? The timing is OFF to say the least.
Then we have Rachel. Rachel is mid career and is up for a promotion. She had been up for promotion for the past 2 years at the law firm that she works. She told herself that if she had not been promoted by 40, she would unfreeze the eggs she currently has stored. When she made that deal with herself, she always felt she would be promoted by then. She feels ready to have a baby, although she would be a single mom. However, she is worried about if it could possibly affect her promotion. Is she running out of time for both a promotion and motherhood?
Then you have Kerry. Kerry wants to start a family while in her final year of business school. She had received a very lucrative job offer the summer prior to the start of her final year of school. Kerry is 27 years old and married. She feels like it's the right time to start a family. She actually didn’t think about how her new employers would feel about her being pregnant at the time of starting her new job. But now that she is pregnant, she did the math and she will start her job 3 weeks prior to her due date with her first child. What was she thinking, was she impulsive?
In which scenario is it the right time to start a family? Well, to be honest, all are the right time, because, well, starting a family is challenging no matter what your situation. And frankly, I have never met anyone that actually regretted the “STARTING”, they regretted the timing. But I would bet that if they really analyzed it, at every moment of their life it was probably less than ideal. When I think about where I was in my career when I started my family. Every single step up until now would have been a challenge. EVERY SINGLE STEP. Why is it so difficult to start a family? It is because becoming a parent is what I call the GREAT PIVOT. It requires a massive shift in thought- from “only self” to “self and then dear baby”. Notice how I didn't say it was a shift to “us”. I am of the belief that you can not lump yourself into any discussion on baby without it FIRST and foremost working for you. Then you consider the baby. This massive shift likely may be the first time you ever experienced a dramatic course change of this magnitude. However, some may have experienced a GREAT PIVOT when deciding on which undergraduate school to attend. Should I choose the school where I would have a full scholarship playing volleyball that was figuratively on another planet(actually it was just another state, far from home and culturally very different) or should I choose the school that did not offer a full ride, but had a great film major that I secretly wanted to pursue (private school guilt anyone?). Or maybe some of us experienced this when our significant other got a huge promotion and asked you to move with him to Budapest with your two young children while you were in the middle of building your own young and budding career. The point is that you may only have 2 or 3 GREAT PIVOTS in your entire life. And they are hard, anxiety filled, fear producing and can physically cause illness in your body.
Unless of course you know they are coming and treat them as you would any pivot.