Married life.

Growing up in the good Catholic family that was mine, my parents stayed together (although there were many times I feared they'd divorce, due to Dad liking the sauce a bit too much, but that's a whole other fish to fry). This created a vision of "married" in my little developing psyche that my grown up marriage doesn't coincide with at all.

A bit of history:

My parents had already been married 12 years when I was born and were 35 with a 10 year old and a 3 year old. They were tired. Dad worked long hours and Mom bounced from part-time jobs that included Midnights and weekends for years. They did what was expected. They got married (at an older than average age for their time period: married in 1972 when they were both 24) and started a family. Somehow they raised us right and there were no babies out of wedlock or major let downs: both my sister and I graduated college and my brother is a Sergeant in the U.S. Army.

Fast forward to now. Married for five and a half months. I don't want children and we have Husbands 7 year old (and estranged 3 1/2 year old) to make up a very different kind of family. I still don't feel how kid version of myself imagined things would feel, mostly because I don't think you can fathom what adulthood feels like in general. More so, because I'm living a different experience than I watched as a youngster.

We have good days and bad days, like any couple. To this day, whenever we have a disagreement/argument (whatever you want to call it), it is the only emotional situation where I feel like I could hurl (everything else almost always triggers emo-eating). When things are bad, it only makes me want to fix things, learn from it and move on. When things are good, they are really good, like, I almost want to slap myself because I wonder how I lucked out and found someone so made for me. It's slightly nauseating.

Step-parenting, at its worst, feels like attempting to walk on egg shells that have been strewn across a semi-frozen lake (to me at least) but most of the time it isn't like that. Most of the time its nice to be important to someone other than Husband on a regular basis and to take pride in her accomplishments. She is a great kid, and that makes things so easy. Whenever Little One comes back into the picture, who knows how things will ensue.

I still don't know about babies. I love them, and my sister is having one in May which I couldn't be more excited for, but I just don't know if I want to share my husband any more than I already do. Call me selfish and weird, but its the damn truth. Plus the whole shaping of an individual's psyche freaks me out. Add in the expectation of child-rearing once married (why? we aren't farmers and over-population is sort of a problem these days) and I just don't feel the need to procreate.

I never had a relationship that lasted more than 6 months before I met my husband. I feel like I could spend the rest of our lives enjoying that (along with our kitty and maybe a dog, if we ever get a house) and investing our time and energy in each other, and his kids he already has.

I know, I know, I can hear you saying, "you will just wake up one day and want a baby of your own" and maybe I will, but for now, I'm going to spoil my niece that is coming in May, focus on my marriage and help raise my step-kids, and I'm perfectly okay with that.