Grateful Thursday, at least in the end

Laying in bed last night, listening to the crackling of my ear plugs slowly expanding in my ear canals, I was thinking about my upcoming birthday. I will be 28 in two weeks from yesterday. When my mother was 28, she had a newborn son, my older brother. By the time she was 30, she had two children-- an infant boy and a newborn me, and was planning a move to DC for a few years. By the time she was 34, she had three kids. I remember about this time of my life, my earliest memories, thinking about how big my parents were, and a few years later about how old they were. I feel like over the last ten years or so, the distance between our ages has shrunk, and I now don't think of them as old at all. But there are still 30 years between, and there always will be.

Over the weekend, I spent some time with my friend, Kelsy, who has a 3-month-old little girl. She really wanted her daughter, couldn't wait to get pregnant and have a child. It's natural to her. My good friends, Tom and Sherri, who have my favorite three-year-old little boy in the world, are a couple years older than me, with about the same age span between them and their son as there is between me and my parents, and they seem like they never gave having children a second thought. It's like when people, normal people, hit a certain age, they suddenly think it's ok, that it's natural, that they should bring another person onto this earth and be fully responsible for how the child turns out, that they know they won't drop it or neglect it or somehow screw it up. That they're ok with the fact their lives as they knew them are over for good. Even happy about that.

So, what's wrong with me, why haven't I had that "click" that changes me into a person who wants kids? I am still a kid. I struggle with this-- is this a good thing, something for which to be grateful? Or am I selling myself short? Denying myself something that would be good for me? Or is what's good for me just living my life with my husband?

I'm trying my hardest not to get pregnant, but also understanding if I do, it's not completely the end of the world. Even though it kind of feels like it would be. When I'm 30 I'll reevaluate. That would time the spacing about the same as it is with my parents and me, so it makes me feel not so behind.

I know I've written about this before, but it was on my mind today, and I needed to get it out. What worries me most is that if I were to get pregnant right now, I'm not sure how my husband would react. When I was younger, I always thought I'd "take care of it" but now that I'm married, have been married for five years, to a man that I know I'll always be with, that option isn't on the table anymore. I don't know if he knows that or not. I suppose I should tell him to be sure. He makes comments sometimes, about how nice it is not to have to worry about kids, etc., and in my head I think "what if? what would he say?" Or what if I change my mind and he doesn't? Lord help us both if that happens.

I started to say that I'm not feeling very grateful today, so maybe I won't make a list, but really it's days like today that I need to list the most. So I will force myself. By #5 my funk will be gone.

1) Tuna salad for lunch. With lots of sweet relish. And sweet corn.

2) Staying on the food theme, the shrimp and grits we made were so good. So good. You can find the recipe here. We are instituting a cooking-date-night, both to give us something else to do together and to try out new recipes without me having to fumble around with them myself. This was our first go, and it was a lot of fun.

3) Apparently food is on my mind... we planted our first plants in our vegetable garden yesterday-- two Better Boy tomato plants, a Roma tomato plant, and a habanero pepper plant. Husband loves peppers and spicy food, so that's totally for him. He'll jar them with vinegar to make himself a pepper sauce. This weekend we're planting the rest from seeds-- sweet corn, carrots, zucchini, squash, cucumber, honeydew, soybeans, and snap beans. As we grow it, we plan to blanch and freeze a lot of it for use later in the year, especially the beans.

4) Emily just made another sale. She's been down the last few days, same as her sales, but she's feeling a lot better now. They paid for a full year up front too.

5) Well, listing my grateful items wasn't helping as much today, so I opened up my chat window with my husband to ask him how he would react if I got pregnant. I had been putting that question off for too long. He said "I'm not going to leave you or anything, but there is a lot of living I would like to do before I give myself up to caring for a child, and I would rather have some sort of plan and some money set up before that happens." Perfectly rational and reasonable, which I should have guessed. He also said that he doesn't like me going through these "what if" games because it just makes me worry, and that I should trust that he's the calm and positive one (he is) and that we'd get through it. Which we would. So I'm ok now.

Going to eat #1 now.