And now it's go time. The Universe is shoving us out the door and into the new life we've been envisioning. It's an exciting, invigorating feeling but it's also terrifying because for the first time in many years the future is an unknown.
My husband really dislikes unknowns. He's a play-it-safe kind of guy which makes us a great team because there's not much I like more than an unknown. I bring the adventure. He keeps our feet on the ground.
Yesterday, I asked him to read my new blog post. When he was done, he said, "It's like you're pregnant!"
This took me a minute and some further explanation from him to process particularly given that biologically, it is impossible that I ever could be pregnant again (no uterus, remember?) but, ultimately, it made perfect sense. IF we could possibly somehow find out that we were pregnant, it would be a weird time for us to have a baby and it would be very scary considering my age and the fact that we're both pretty psyched our kids are both old enough to almost be self-sufficient. But we would, without question, choose to have that baby and we would simply arrange our lives around making room for it. This would not be a decision based on financial intelligence. Having a newborn right now (or anytime) would not be a financially intelligent thing to do. But it would be a decision we would make with our hearts (those are the kinds of decisions I'm best at, by the way -- maybe the only kind I ever make). In the end, it wouldn't feel like a choice to us -- we would do the thing that needed to be done and do it with our whole hearts and selves.
My husband and I were lucky that we had our actual babies when we did, without much (well, ANY really in the case of our oldest) thinking it through, without much waiting for the perfect time. We've both seen many couples try to plan the perfect pregnancy and it usually doesn't work out so well. There is almost never a "perfect" time to make a heart decision. There is almost never going to be enough of everything one needs to take such a profoundly life-changing step. Having a baby is a perfect example of leaping and letting the net appear underneath you, as you fall.
Yesterday, my husband said, "There's never going to be a perfect time but it's obvious that THIS is the time. There is no other choice. THIS is obviously the ONLY choice."
So, just like we have done with every other unknown in our lives -- including our actual pregnancies -- we will hold hands, take a step and start falling into this new life, together. Whatever that means and whatever that brings, we can be certain of one thing -- we had no other choice.