One of the bloggers on Work It, Mom! is a working dad, and he recently posted an interesting entry on being a younger-than-average parent. I know a little about that…
By almost every objective measure, I was too young for parenthood at 20. I was still in college, living with my parents, not working, not married (although that last was remedied pretty quickly)…but things can and do happen, and in so many ways it turned out much better than those objective measures would have predicted. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I had a kindergartener, a college degree, a start on my career, and a husband working on a Ph.D. I think there are some significant things that happen when you have a child young – in many ways you grow up a lot faster, and in others you grow up right along with the child. And in still other ways, your redirecting of your energies to your child and family before you’re really ready for that causes some of your own growth to stall – but I didn’t really understand that last one till quite a few years later.
I have rarely had friends in my own age group with kids at the same stage as mine, since I got such a head start on everyone. When my son was getting into his teens and peers were just becoming mothers, I heard a lot of “You’re lucky you were so young when you had him – he’ll be in college by the time you’re 40, and I’ll still have preschoolers.” It sounded like a tradeoff was in the offing – my husband and I hadn’t had much “couple time” together before we became parents, but we’d have it later when we’d have more time (and money) to enjoy it. As it turned out, the tradeoff, at least for me, ended up yielding “alone time,” since we divorced a few months before our son graduated from high school. I did have a kid in college before I turned 40, though – and I was starting to understand that I had to work on doing some growing of my own, the part that had stalled and been redirected…and that I was reminded of when I watched the character of Lorelai on Gilmore Girls (an even younger mother than I was).
I’ve accomplished some of that growth and work on myself over the last few years. Now I’m married again and involved in raising two more children, and I feel like I’m at the “just right” age for that now, especially for the older one, my stepdaughter. I’ve got lots of parenting experience this time around, but I’ve also got more life experience generally, and more knowledge and understanding of who I am.
When I was finally ready to start dating again after my divorce, I really wasn’t that interested in anyone who hadn’t been married before himself, or at least in a long-term relationship – it was important to me that there be some “life experience” on both sides. With that expectation, it seemed pretty likely that there would be kids somewhere in the picture on his side – and that since I’ve never been a fan of big age differences between the members of a couple (3 to 5 years is quite enough for me), his kids probably would be younger than mine. If a relationship developed and got serious, this man’s children would also be more of an ongoing factor in it than mine would be, since he’d gone away to college – before I was 40 – and was closer to being on his own, at least chronologically.
As it turned out, those were all pretty realistic expectations – Tall Paul is 17 months older than I am, my stepchildren are 12 and 7, and my son just turned 23 and has gotten his adult life underway on the east coast. And one of the things we agreed on well before we got married was that the kids we brought into our relationship were going to be the only ones we had. We’ve got ten years till my stepson is out of high school, and at that point we’ll still be a few years shy of 60, and we want to be done (as much as parents ever are, really, which is never – the details of the job description just change). We are “too old” to want to start back at the beginning now, and despite the occasional joking comments to each other that “We should have a baby, honey!,” we’re not sorry it would be a physical challenge at this point if we did want it anyway.
But there is one thing I’m still too young for, and my son has been warned about making me a grandmother too long before I’m 50. Fortunately, I’m pretty sure he still feels like he’s going to be too young for that for quite a few more years.
