Life Choices

I have a good friend from college days who thinks I know every cliche in the known universe. For her sake, these are a few that have been going through my mind lately:

"Walk a mile in my shoes"
"Don't judge a book by its cover"
"People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"

It's the idea that the choices we make are somehow lacking in someone else's eyes. It's the idea that you have to explain yourself to anyone and everyone who asks the question because the simple answer isn't good enough. What it is actually, is annoying as hell.

This comes in a variety of ways, the example that I'll use today is the planning of one's family. Why in the world do people take such a personal and profoundly private subject and parade it around for debate and opinion? Why in the world would I think that my personal feelings on the number of children to have or not have is somehow relevant to anyone else around me?

And yet people make all kinds of assumptions ... oh you need another child - two just isn't enough. You're still so young, you'll have more. As soon as they get a little older you'll miss having a baby at home. And on and on and on. You know what I want to yell sometimes at the top of my lungs?? (Besides the obvious shut up, mind your own damn business, and if I wanted a chaotic life with forlorn children like yours - sure I'd have a dozen) What I want to yell is "I AM HAPPY WITH MY LIFE THE WAY IT IS!" What is wrong with that?

Truth is - I LOVE my two children. I LOVE that they are so close together. I LOVE that I have one of each. I LOVE that we are out of the baby stages and safely ensconsed in some of my most favorite times - toddler/preschool/potty-trained/fully functioning child-dom. I hang out with friends who are pregnant or who have young babies and I breathe a secret sigh of relief that I am not them. I go gift shopping at Babies-R-Us and I feel a little wave of nausea as I walk through the aisles and remind myself that I'm not there for me. I sing a chorus of hallelujah's every month that mother nature tells me once again, in no uncertain terms, that I am not pregnant. I am not one of those women who wants to hold everyone else's babies. Sure, I'll happily babysit for you because I love to serve, but the whole time I'm doing it I'll remind myself how its only for a short while and then its back to normal with my own two kids.

But that's just me. I applaud other women who want housefuls of kids and admire their strength and management skills. And I applaud other women who can't imagine life with kids at all, because at least they are honest with themselves. And I applaud everything in between. I applaud women who work outside of the home 40+ hours a week (let's face it, most of them put way more in than 40) and then come home and do all the work that is required of them there. And I applaud those women who stay home to raise happy, healthy, intelligent and fully-loved children because that is by far the hardest and most demanding use of time in the entire world. And I applaud women who adopt other children and I applaud women who give up on fertility because its just too hard. And I applaud women who get kicked in the teeth by people all around them who want to step in and tell them how their decisions about their families should somehow be different, or could be better, or are mistaken or are short-sighted.

And you know what else I applaud? The right to be any of those afore-mentioned mothers at any given time of our lives. In other words, I applaud the right to change our minds.