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[calimary]

345. I am rather ferociously pro-choice. My husband is, too.

We've been married almost since dinosaurs roamed the earth. But when we first got married, I did not want children. Actually, I didn't want them at all. On the other hand, my husband had nowhere near ruled it out. But because I didn't want children, and I also had a career that was going pretty great and was very demanding, he totally supported me. So for the first 13 years of our marriage, I pursued my career single-mindedly, and was very glad to do so. Besides, I was afraid that I might find myself someday resenting a child I'd had, who presumably might take me away from work and short-circuit my career and prevent me from building what I wanted to build.

And then I approached age 35 and had been knocked around (sometimes pretty hard) in various jobs, I started evolving. And circumstances combining the way they did, I hit age 35 and something snapped. All of a sudden, I decided that it was time, I wasn't getting any younger, I was in a job that provided some rather generous maternity leave advantages, and also I started realizing that it wasn't all about work for me anymore. I'd had plenty of time to build a career of which I was very proud, and I was getting older and feeling little twinges of awareness that the kinds of demands on my life, my energy, my time, my stress levels, etc. that my work required - just might be more suited to the younger professionals coming up behind me, who didn't mind fighting traffic, dealing with bullshit, standing on their feet all day and well into the evening covering a story and then yet again on their feet well into the wee hours editing tape, etc. My career, as it had evolved (I was a news reporter), began to be less and less what I got into the business to do and always wanted to do.

I was in broadcasting to BROADCAST. Unfortunately, soon enough, my job became mostly about office politics and driving miles through rush-hour traffic to cover some story or conduct some in-person interview, and knock myself out for people who didn't give a damn and weren't that interested in the product I was generating, or supervisors who were damn near un-pleasable, hyper-critical, and playing political power games all the time and cutting back on staff but piling that extra work on those of us who were still on staff, writing memos and answering this new development called an email and trying to figure out this new development called electronic editing when I'd always worked with reel-to-reel tape and a splicing block. I'd go cover some fancy event like the Oscars for which we were required to dress up - but since I wasn't allowed an engineer anymore, I was always down on my hands and knees crawling around under tables on filthy floors and in dirty corners with wire-strippers and stuff, searching in vain for phone-line inputs and other stuff, and in over my head on the electronics part which I was almost totally unfit to understand. My actual broadcast time withered down to maybe three percent of my average day. Office politics and other bullshit started to eat up a bigger and bigger share of this. It just wasn't fun anymore. What I loved about my job - was fast fading away. As that disenchantment grew, and I was falling out of love with my career, I started realizing that maybe this was the time I could shift gears in a more meaningful direction for my life. I figured if I was gonna do it at all, we better try for it now. This was also with a clear memory of Patti Frustaci and her absolute obsessive desperation to have more children so she took fertility drugs and went through a ridiculously arduous, extreme, and expensive ordeal and had the first set of septuplets.

http://archive.is/dUcvm

I didn't want to go through that. So we got started, and my husband was more than ready. No kidding about that, either! Much to my surprise, one baby and then two-and-a-half years later another, arrived - and rather swiftly, too. We didn't mess around! (Uh, well, I guess maybe we did mess around just enough... )

Longwinded way of saying - my husband and I were not on the same page for quite some time. And he waited until I was ready. It was totally my choice, my decision, and my call. Those kids are both grown now and pretty much gone, and my husband and I are still together and going strong.