Reply to I wish society didn't encourage people to put off having kids.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Living in DC really skewed my idea about the right age to have kids. I saw and worked with so many older women who were pregnant, it seemed very natural to wait until late 30s early 40s to have a baby, and living here very much normalized that for me. What I didn’t see or have any appreciation for as a younger woman was the difficulty many of them must have endured to be pregnant, I.e. the infertility, miscarriages, IVF, etc. Because people rarely talk about that, all you see is the pregnant mom and you go to the baby shower and then you see the cute baby photos/announcement. So we waited to get pregnant and then struggled with infertility, and then I sustained a life altering birth injury that I would probably not have sustained should we have decided to have kids a decade earlier.

While I take responsibility for my choices, I, for one, will not continue to remain silent about the sacrifices to I made to become a mom and the challenges of mothering at an older age to younger women who are looking up to me. We owe it to each other to be fully honest about the benefits and drawbacks of being an older FTM. Personally I wish we had not waited so long, and had kids when we were younger and had more energy. It also would have meant we could have had the option of a bigger family.

That said, if DH and I also hadn’t been strapped with nearly 100K of student loan debt and had our careers take a hit with the Great Recession, I also think we would have been able to contemplate kids earlier because we would have had more money to afford childcare. [/quote]

Good for you but no woman should think that pregnancy and childbirth will be injury free even in youth. It's a traumatic ordeal regardless of how old or young you are.[/quote]

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