Oh, You Want a Family, Do You?

It's funny how we perceive things as children. How completely easy being an adult seems to be. How we cannot wait to grow up. Silly, silly us.

As a child, you get asked a lot what you want to be when you grow up. I had all the right answers: a famous actress, a famous singer, a hooker.

"Yes, I actually once told someone I wanted to be a hooker."

I think I was, like, 7 years old, so I’m excused. Don’t even ask me where I might have picked up that profession as an answer. My parents had colorful friends and I had two older sisters, so you can just imagine.

It wasn’t until I was in my late teens or early twenties that I realized the only career that I really wanted was that of a wife and mother. I had no interest in college, or finding a job that made me feel fulfilled. I knew in my heart of hearts that my fulfillment would come from starting a family. And I had it all planned out - married by 23, my first baby by 25, second by 27, and etc. I did not know how many children I would end up having, that would depend on my future husband, wherever he may be.

Spoiler alert - I was not married at 23. I did not have any offspring by 25. So, I learned my first lesson about having a family - nothing works out the way you plan or expect. But that’s the fun part. Or at least it was for me. I did get married - at 27. I had my first child at 28, and my second at 30. Oh, and I was divorced by 41. Did not plan on that one at all…and I am sure I will come back to that. Yup, LOTS of material there for sure.

Another thing I did not count on was the “extras”. The kids of close friends. The close friends of my kids. The niece my ex-husband and I raised for a few years (the teenage years - lots a material there, too!), and the daughter of my boyfriend (extra lucky there). These are the family members that you don’t ever plan on, that you don’t realize are going to become such important members of your family. Family is such a well used word, and can mean so many different things to so many people.

As for my family - The Original Cast, as I like to call it - well, I like to think I got lucky. My parents fell in love at an early age (read: mom got pregnant at 18, they got married), and had three perfect daughters. (This is my story, and if I say we were perfect, we were perfect, OK?). I know my parents have said that life was not always peaches and cream - the favorite line is, “We had one dollar at the end of every week to put gas in the car to go to your grandparents on Friday nights for dinner” - but they sure did work hard at making us think that they had no worries. We never saw my parents fight, even though mom says they went a whole two weeks one time without speaking, and I feel as though that alone had such a positive impact on me.

Raising three girls in the 70’s and 80’s could not have been easy but my parents did that and they both worked full time on top of it all. Dad didn’t always make it to my little league games (2 summers when I was probably 8 and 9, I was no athlete by any stretch of the imagination), and mom was tired a lot (that actually turned out to be a liver disease symptom, although we didn’t know it at the time and we almost lost her, but that is another story for another day), and both of my sisters were a lot older than me, but I never felt like our family was anything but perfect. I had friends with divorced parents, friends with only one parent, and friends whose parents weren’t the nicest, so I understood just how lucky I was.

Growing up with two parents who still seemed very much in love, always showing affection (so gross to thirteen year old me), made me dream of having the same loving family and household when I grew up. Sitting on the couch on Friday nights waiting for my mom to get home from work (bank didn’t close until 8:30 on Friday nights in those days!) while watching Perfect Strangers or Webster with my dad is one of my most vivd childhood memories. Everything was as it should be. And I wanted that for myself as an adult.

When I did finally get the family I had dreamed of, it wasn’t exactly as I had planned, as I had pictured. It was chaotic. It was loud. It was stressful. I didn’t remember this from growing up. This frenzied hurry up and stop, hurry up and go, just hurry up life was not part of what it was supposed to be like to have a family. At least that was what 7 year old me kept whispering in 30 year old me’s ear. My parents made it look so easy! LIES!

The payoff though - that was spot on. The feeling I get every time one of my boys says, “love you, mom” is worth every labor pain, every fingerprint on a wall or window, every trip to the ER. The process wasn’t how I planned it but my boys are perfect. Just like I was.

Life never happens how you plan it, but if you’re lucky you end up with what you had most hoped for. Which I did.