I keep scrolling through my social media and all I see are baby pictures and wedding announcements, and the only thing that I can think is: ‘am I a failure because I don’t have a wedding ring or a nursery?’ I had this set plan of what I want to do with my life and at what age I want to have kids and when I want to get married, my best friends and I all knew our plans, and then we graduated.
Granted, we had a few friends that had kids in high school, and that’s normal, but when we graduated, the amount of people that we went to school with, created a family all within the following year or two was a lot higher than I thought. People would be people getting engaged on a Friday and getting married 3 months later on a Tuesday, after only knowing each other for like 2 months. How is it that the people that I was sitting behind in English, are now buying houses and starting families right after high school? I’m struggling to even wake up on time for class, and everyone else seems to be finding the love of their lives in a matter of months.
Some pregnany is unplanned, but I used to log onto Facebook and see people posting drunken pictures of them and their friends at a concert, and now I see people posting pregnancy pictures and videos of their babies laughing. And I don’t know if I am behind on my life plan, or if something in this Utah water is making everyone start their families at 20. I’m not against it, I just feel like my kids are going to be 4 and everyone else will have their kids going into junior high.
I’m too busy to have kids right now, I’m not financially stable, and really? Is anybody really completely stable at 20? Think about it: you have tuition, books, gas, rent, Spotify, and your Victoria Secret credit card payment to make every month. So the amount of money that is needed to pay for just you is a crazy amount. Just estimating that it can be around $1,500 a month to be a college student. If you aren’t in college, that can be a bit cheaper, but to add the addition expenses of a baby, can make it up to three times that amount.
And if you’re getting married? A wedding dress, the venue, invitations, food, etc. It’s a one-time expense, but it’s a BIG expense, so that’s just as expensive. But you do get a cool Kitchen Aid mixer out of it.
I have this saying, “I don’t want to be giving a baby bottles, if I can’t go buy my own type of bottles.” I haven’t had time to experience my 20’s, I want to travel, and see people and experience different worlds, I’m used to holding my friend’s hair while she pukes over a toilet, I don’t think I’m ready to have a baby puking on my shoulder just yet. But all these baby and family pictures make me feel like I have to start my family like yesterday.
It’s okay. I don’t need it. I need to finish school and focus on my career; my future husband should be doing the same. There are people that will think otherwise, but I feel like I have plenty of time.
My friends and I are all the same, seeing someone, some of us more committed than others, but we aren’t married or have any kids with our partners. So when we see someone that we know that is, we tend to share it with each other in our group chat. That’s normal right? Well, after two years, we decided to make a list of everyone that we knew that has had a kid, is having a kid, is engaged and or is married. We had a total of 97 people on that list, that we personally knew, and honestly, we probably missed some.
So does this make me delayed, or does this make me smart?
Neither. It makes me, me. It’s okay for me to not want a family right now. That’s normal and okay. It’s also normal for anyone else to be married if that’s what they want, or for them to have a kid. But I have a feeling, that it’s only a Utah thing; or that maybe it happens more in Utah than any other state. I notice that people in Utah will know each other for about 4 months, and then get engaged, how does someone get to know everything about their partner within that time and plan eternity with them? You don’t know their habits, if it will bug you, if they are just trying to impress you or if they’re secretly a murderer…
I feel like our generation has been moving too fast, and trying to grow up too soon. I don’t want to and that is okay because I have my own life to live and my children will love me even if I don’t have them by 21.