I don’t want kids. At least, I don’t want them right now.
Before my husband and I got married, I straight up said that I wasn’t ready to have children…yet. I was ready for the life changes being married to a soldier would bring and all the personal challenges that I would face as well. I haven’t moved from one area in about 9 years and knew I would have an adjustment period. Not only that, I have a lot of personal goals that I was aspiring to achieve.
Instead of continuing to climb the corporate ladder in New York City, I am navigating through the work-from-home environment and building my workload in a completely new and different way than I’m used to. I am loving my new journey and want to continue growing and gaining experience in my career from this lifestyle.
I know it is possible to continue my work with the military lifestyle. Heck, I’m doing it now. Everything is still so new to me and I believe that I need to take a moment to digest all of the new things that military life has to offer.
As with any change, it takes time to really smooth out the kinks and for me, I want to use that time for personal and professional growth as a military spouse. Not to mention, I would like to enjoy being married to my husband, just him and I, living life together and getting to know each other more in the process.
I want to grow together as a couple too. That’s important to me before we bring kids into the equation.
Most of our relationship before marriage was spent from a distance, which I learned is very common in the military community. We would spend every other weekend together and flat-out fell in love. It wasn’t long until I realized that I want him around long-term and knew that both our lives would change.
It doesn’t go without saying that after meeting my husband, I thought of ways to update my career path and that’s how I eventually landed on telecommuting. I figured that everything, between myself and the changes for my husband too, we need some time to put all our pieces together before we grow our family.
It’s not just me making all the decisions. I may have opened up the topic of children, but we also talked about his thoughts on the subject. A marriage is a two-way street after-all. My husband has career goals he’s working toward too and felt the same way about spending time together as a married couple before little ones.
I’m extremely glad that my husband and I discussed children before we got married. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that you want to spend your life with another person. On the other hand, adding another little being to the family often comes as an afterthought. It could also be big deal breaker.
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Don’t be afraid to discuss children with your partner. It’s easy to talk about what you want personally and sometimes the children conversation may not be on the top of your mind. If you feel like you’ve reached a pivotal time in your relationship, speak up. Try to approach the conversation with a good idea about your thoughts on the children front before you take the big plunge and your future life partner should have a good sense too.
To be honest, we’re up in the air. I’ve always just focused on my work and find so much fulfillment in that. The same goes with my husband. We still talked about children because we knew that it was another natural huge life-altering change, similar (but not equal) to marriage and that it would be an injustice to not broach the topic.
Right now we want to be married to each other and realize that we aren’t ready for children. Also, we’ve given ourselves a tentative timeline before we open up the topic again. Of course, we get that sometimes life has different plans for you, so we’re taking everything with a grain of salt and planning our path to the best of our abilities.
Did you or are you waiting to have children?
Kids aren’t in our future either. I also want to focus on my career, it’s hard enough to have one of those as a milspouse without kids let alone with them. I could go on about my reasons, but suffice to say I belive it’s one of those decisions you both must be 200% sure of and ready for and I’m not.