When I and my husband married we anticipated a passel of children running around the house within a few years.  We were both in our thirties and we both had a lifelong desire to raise a family. As luck would have it

we were married in August and pregnant by October, and we met our boy the following June.  Determined to beat the clock (I was in my mid-thirties at the time) we commenced to begin on our second pregnancy six months after I gave birth.

Three (possibly four, we’re not sure) miscarriages later, one pregnancy which went as far as a heartbeat on the sonogram, over a period of almost 2 years and three attempts at fertility treatment (which will be the topic of another post) we succeeded in getting and staying pregnant (27 weeks later) and looking at an August due date.

The emotional rollercoaster, and physical strain of being pregnant, trying to get pregnant, miscarrying and all the while running a business almost pushed me to mental and physical breakdown. I was very lucky in that I had an amazingly supportive husband to help me through the worst of it.

Needless to say I and my husband would have liked to have started a family in our twenties, but we were not fortunate enough to meet at that time in our lives.  But the fact remains that starting a family after the age of thirty is extremely iffy.  As my doctor explained to me, approximately 90% of  your eggs are gone by the age of thirty-five.

Yes, I am pregnant and will likely carry to term by this point, but it was an extremely unsure thing, and I had to track my ovulation cycle with extraordinary precision.  This was not a romantic endeavour, it was almost three years of effort and heartache.

If you are planning on having children, and you have the opportunity to do so, don’t wait.  A career is not time sensitive, people can become financial successes in mid-life and later. Very few who waited to have a family at mid-life or later will ever do so.  They will have missed out on the daily joy, purpose and love that only a family will provide you.  Money is just a means to an end, a loving family is everything else before and beyond that.

There you have it, my ramblings on a subject that I feel too few are willing to confront in this materialistic age we live in.

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