what if...?

What if we had decided not to pursue adoption and not have any children. What would our lives look like now? How would our focus be different?

I know one thing is for sure, we would have gone on a kick ass, hot destination vacation during this wretched winter! We’d likely be thinking about getting a different vehicle. Possibly doing some small renovation projects to our house.

But all of those things just involve the use of money that is currently tied up in savings for a different purpose.

How would life be different in general? Would we make new friends because all our current ones have kids and are at a very different life stage then us? Would we spend more time volunteering to find purpose and meaning or would we become more selfish because life would just be about us? Would we grow closer together because kids wouldn’t get in the way of our relationship or further apart because we wouldn’t have the common goals and desires related to parenthood?

What would we do with our time? Now we’re anticipating lives full of diapers, playing, soccer games, and piano lessons. What would fill in the spaces of that extra time? Would we feel less stress by not becoming parents or more stress because we haven’t followed the “norms” of society and fall on the fringes.*

We’d definitely be able to retire sooner and possibly even find a small retirement community by the ocean somewhere!

I've been thinking about this whole idea of never becoming a mom lately. As I watch countless others become parents I wonder if my time has passed. Maybe it just isn't "meant to be." Maybe these adoption plans were just a ruse to keep my mind busy for a time, planning and preparing for a future that included a child. Perhaps I need to face my current reality with different eyes. Is this what life holds for me? I am blessed with so much but yet why do I feel so empty? I know we could make life without children work. The thing is that I don’t want to make it work in that way. I want more from life, a fullness and richness that can in part be provided through family. I will put myself through this waiting hell to get that. To become a mom and look beyond myself and what I could have accomplished on my own, to look upon a child and be needed in a way that I have never experienced before.

For that I will wait.

*Just for the record, to adopt transracially already pushes us out into the fringes of society and we will experience this fact regardless.