I am turning 30 this year. I am feeling sad because at this age I should already have a family of my own. You know, with a wonderful and loving almost 6-ft-tall husband (because I wanted to have tall kids) and probably a kid. I always want a boy for my first born. Name him Nathaniel or Zachary because Nate, Nathan and Zach sounds really good for a nickname. Or you know, probably another kid - a girl named Margaux because I liked this character in one of Nora Roberts trilogy.
Yeah, my biological clock is ticking and you can't blame me considering some lousy options - like getting a "donor" and all and some crazy stuffs. But then I can't help thinking of the consequences that these crazy things might lead to. The mere picture of me during the pregnancy stage (vomitting my self to death and getting drowsy because of morning sickness and tending myself, craving for food that I will need to buy myself, waking in the wee hours of the morning because of leg cramps that I will need to massage by myself), during childbirth (going through these labor pains by myself with nobody to hold my hands while I shouted the long "Ahhhhhhh" after the doctor says "1, 2, 3, Push!") and the post-natal thingies (nobody to share the moment of looking at your child for the first time, nobody to share your thoughts on the excitement of having to breastfeed your baby for the first time, nobody to share those sleepless nights because you need to feed the baby or to change diapers, nobody to share the excitement of your baby's firsts.) alone makes my heart ache. I mean maybe I cannot take it doing alone. I mean who wants to be a single mom if you have any option right? Moreso, I'm thinking what will I tell my kid if he/she was old enough to ask him where is his/her daddy. Yeah... So I'm dropping the "donor" thing for now because I think it's complicated and by the way, I still have time to find that "prince" and do some nagging on what took him so long to find me. :)
The decisionmaking tends to be more complicated if you have a family of your own since you need to consult your partner and discuss the impact of each options to your life as a couple and balancing it together with the kids' welfare. Moreover, the relocation to other countries when you have a family can be more complicated. The parents need to have jobs in order to sustain the rent and bills. On top of this, the couple need to find somebody who can take care of the kid/s while they are away working. They also need to find a good school that can cater the children's educational needs. Hmmm... the list of all the consideration can be quite long. My deciding factors when I got the offer to work here in Singapore are fairly simple and mostly are based in numbers and straight-line computations. No if-and-else conditions. I got to make the decision on my own. No other person to consult. No kids to consider.
From this, I do not know if I can consider myself lucky or not. Maybe I am because I can do whatever I want, I can make immediate decisions without impacting anybody's life. Maybe not, because at the end of the day, it's nice to go home to a place where you can see kids running around, toys all around, listening to the endless themes of those kiddie shows and movies, and most especially coming home to somebody who you can talk to and have these limitless supply of hugs and kisses.
Today, I got to talk with Auntie (she's the not-that-old cleaning lady that I always had a chat with) and we had discussed some of these things that I've mentioned earlier - the body clock and the family thing. It's what she said that made me smile. "YOU DON'T NEED TO WORRY. YOU JUST NEED TO BE HAPPY!"
And then, realization came. Yeah, that's it! The most important thing is that I need to be HAPPY whatever happens. :)
