Timelines

I know I shouldn’t compare myself to other people, but one of my biggest preoccupations as the months tick by is figuring out where we are in relation to everyone else’s reproductive timeline.  This year I’ll turn 30 and Henry will turn 35, so it definitely feels like a year of reckoning.

My mom had me at 23, and Henry’s mom had him at 28.  My cousins (except for the one who ended up having to use donor eggs and sperm) all had their kids earlier than I will.  Henry’s sister, who is a few months younger than me, had her first baby in September.  All but one of Henry’s friends apparently coordinated behind our backs: even the ones who aren’t married have kids between nine months and a year old. (But I’m not sure exactly how we compare to them, since most of the women are Henry’s age… for example, one of Henry’s friends is a 34 year old woman married to a 39 year old man.  Does that make them our peers, or four years older than us?)  My closest friends, meanwhile, are a hodgepodge of married, single, and even a divorce, but so far there’s only one baby in the bunch.  My best friend, like me, is trying without much luck, but she’s five months older than me so does that mean we’re on the same schedule if we conceive at the same time, or if I get pregnant five months after her?  And don’t think for a second that I don’t know exactly when I’d have to conceive to be on the same timeline as a Facebook friend, a year ahead of me in college, who is expecting her first baby any day now (Fun fact: based on her due date, she conceived the month we started trying.  That’ll be a fun little reminder on my news feed soon!).

Yeah, ok, I’m crazy, no need to point it out (Henry, I’m speaking specifically to you here).  All I’m trying to say is that I’m a little unhealthily obsessed with figuring out where we stand.  We all need a hobby.

That said, I had a really, really good night at my neighbors’ house this weekend.  These are people that I would love to be one day – they’re our block’s unofficial leaders, their rehabbed house is gorgeous, they have two cute kids, and they just seem like people who did everything right and have it all figured out.  They embody the exact opposite of how I feel these days.

They had the block over to their house on Saturday night for soup and wine, and in the course of conversation with the wife she mentioned to me that she will turn 40 this year, and her husband will turn 45.  Of course my mind went straight to their kids, who were asleep upstairs.  Our neighbors are exactly ten years older than us, so how old are their kids?  Suddenly I could not picture their kids, much less guesstimate their ages.  Thankfully, asking about someone’s children is not creepy in the slightest, so I just asked.  “How old are your kids?”  Hallelujah - the older one is about five, and the younger is about to turn three.  Based on their schedule we’re not behind, we’re five years ahead!

I don’t know how our neighbors feel about when they had their kids, but from my perspective they don’t seem like old parents, they don’t seem behind schedule, and they don’t seem out of place among the parents of similarly-aged kids in the neighborhood.  They seem right on track, yet when they were our age they were still five years from their first kid.  In five years, we will have this figured out – we will have either had IVF success or adopted or something.  This limbo can’t last forever (right?).

I ended the night happy – talking to this perfect family was a good reminder that just because we’re behind my schedule doesn’t mean we’re actually behind schedule.  Maybe, in 10 years, when Henry and I are 45 and 40, there will be a young, miserable couple who will looks at us and think, “They seem like people who did everything right and have it all figured out.”  Little will they know.