My wife and I are in our mid-30s and have been together about 5 years now. We knew pretty soon after moving in together that we wanted to get married and have kids.
But there was a problem: As career-focused aspiring middle class Americans we wanted to wait till everything was perfect and we were financially stable. We spent our 20s in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis focusing on our careers and living it up in a major city, not thinking of settling down.
When we finally began dating we were already in our early 30s. We moved in together a couple years later and knew we wanted to get married. But we put it off because we wanted to make sure we were even more financial stable. For me this meant taking classes to learn new skills and making a career change, a VERY taxing process. It also meant moving across the country, away from our families and support networks, to where the jobs were.
Finally we decided we were good financially and got married last year, and we were finally ready to start getting serious about having kids. But we decided to put off kids for another couple years until we could be set enough in our jobs and careers to be trusted enough to move back to our home state and have kids with a support network.
Then a couple months after the wedding my wife lost her job and has been unemployed since as all companies in her field are downsizing. I make a decent living and could live like a king in the Midwest, but living in a major city means I can barely support myself, let alone my wife AND a baby.
Then came the kicker. My wife went to the gyno last month and tested positive for a condition that could severely affect her chances at getting pregnant. She worried that being in her mid-30s would already make it harder to have kids, but now this diagnosis put the nail in the coffin.
After all this planning and saving up to have kids and focusing on our careers so we could have stable lives….We may never have kids. It was all for nothing. And the ultimate irony is that all this hustling really got us nowhere. No matter how hard we worked, we kept facing economic setbacks that put us back at square one.
While part of this is definitely our own faults for putting kids off, the other part is we completely bought in to the lie that we should live to work, not work to live. It wasn't until we received news that we may never have kids that it put things in perspective. If we had kids a few years ago we may be in the same place financially regardless, and it wouldn't matter. Likewise, if she suddenly got pregnant tomorrow but we “weren't ready” I'm sure we'd find a way to make ends meet. It would be a better outcome then us going back to school every few years because our degrees become worthless as the world changes, or going through the process of changing jobs and careers every couple years as the only way to get a higher income.
She's got a couple more appointments with the gyno, so we don't know anything for sure. But at least we have pets and friends with kids…..Right?
tl;dr: We're the couple from the opening scene of Idiocracy.