30 Days: Day 18-Something you regret
I try really hard not to have regrets. Everything that has happened in my life, good and bad, has brought me to where I am today. Do I wish somethings had happened differently? Sure, but even so, I don't regret that they happened. For example, our kids were born when we were 24 years old. That sounds young, but we had been together for 6 years by then. While I'm thrilled in most ways that we did have them so young, I sometimes wish that we had more time before them as adults to develop ourselves as a couple before adding kids. We were 17 when we got together and 18 when she graduated and we moved into an apartment with friends. We moved into our own apartment a year later and lived there for a year. It was just us and it was a time that we still think about very fondly. At the end of our year lease, we moved to Colorado and right into my parents basement where we lived for about 6 months. My sister, brother-in-law and niece lived with my parents then too. It was a full house. We moved out of my parents house when Shell was promoted to manager of the Motel 6 she worked at and we moved into the manager's on-site apartment. It was connected to the front lobby area through a hallway, so there were frequent interruptions. When she left that job, it came with the consequence of no longer having a place to live so we moved to my sister's basement while we looked for somewhere to live. During that time, we were also trying to get pregnant which happened while we were living with them. A new apartment complex was being built nearby which would fit into our budget, so we put our name on one. We moved in at the end of May and had 2 lovely months as just us before our babies were born.
Needless to say, there has been very little time in the 19 years we've been together where it was just us. I prefer to look forward to the time when it's just us instead of regretting not having more of it before the kids came. And I really am glad we had our kids at the age we did, I just wish we could have had more "us" time before it happened.
And I just realized that I do have a regret. I regret not managing our finances better and making bad choices that screwed up our credit. I'm very grateful that Shell took charge of things when she did, but I wish I hadn't let it get so bad before she did.
1 comment:
I think there are pros and cons to having kids at any age. I was almost 34 when N was born and almost 39 when J was born. We had a long time just as a couple (14 years) but I think parenting might have been less exhausting if we'd had them younger. (Or if our kids had learned to sleep through the night before the age of five, but that's another story.)
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