I have two wonderful nieces! I always wonder if I died tomorrow will people talk about me and will what they say be something that they can look up to? I want my nieces to think of me and find some guidance that may put their hearts at peace. My sister got pregnant at 20 and never went to college. When she moved out, she moved in with her boyfriend. She didn’t have a job and didn’t know how to drive. For the next few years she stayed at home with no way to leave the house, her life day and night was dedicated to taking care of the home. After a while the routine and the mundane wrecked havoc on her face. No longer was she this vain, but optimistic and independent woman, she became overworked and desperate to escape to a place where she could find her identity again.
Something changed.
My sister got a good job, she got her license and a car. She changed into someone more outspoken, she started defending herself in arguments she would have with her now husband. She’s tired but not in same way as before, there is a light in her that got re-lit the moment she was not just a mom anymore. She will never blame her daughter for her situation but she knows we are not meant to just be one thing. We are career women, wives, daughters, mothers and lovers. We have hobbies and goals.
She found purpose again.
My other sister was in her first semester of college when she got pregnant. My mother’s heart was ripped from her chest and put into a blender and shredded into a million pieces. She was the first daughter she was able to send to college and instead of using the money to fix the house they had just bought, she poured all of it along with her hopes and dreams onto my sister’s out of state tuition.
My sister fell in love.
She met her boyfriend in high school and kept in touch with him even when he went to prison for armed robbery. They wrote and wrote to each other, and my mother would try and keep as many letters as she could intercept. She thought that if she never heard from him she would move on. When he got released from prison she started seeing him. My mother could not object for she feared that would only push her closer to him. Not long after, my sister announced her engagement to him. My mother was livid and didn’t know if she could find a way to get through to her. Eventually my sister abandoned that notion and only 2 months later gave us the news that she was pregnant. She dropped out of college and moved in with her boyfriend.
My niece is a beautiful baby girl with an uncertain future and I know if her parents work hard they will provide her with the future she deserves.
I have no children and if you ask my sister’s what kind of future they see for me they will jokingly say a single woman with a lot of cats. I live alone and have no specific goal in mind to find a husband. My mother never went to college. My mother had her first child when she was 18 and spent the majority of her 20s with a man who would beat her relentlessly. It’s no wonder that my mom wants a better future for her kids and I want to show her how much I appreciate her by being as independent as I can be so that she’ll have one less daughter to worry about. I want her to know I can take care of myself and that she did her job and did it well.
Every step I took was a leap of faith.
When I moved out for the first time I had no car but I moved close enough to my job to where I could walk there. I saved up my money for two years and finally had enough to enroll into a trade school. To save money I swallowed my pride and moved back in with my parents. I never asked for money, I always helped when I could. I was working 40 plus hours and was in school full time. I would wake up at 6 am because my father was my only ride to school and that’s the time he had to leave for work. A month before I graduated I learned to drive, got my license and bought a car. I passed my massage licensing exam and paid off school in full. I saved up enough money and a month after I graduated I moved out of my parents home and into my apartment. I had to put bills in my name for the first time. I had to furnish my whole apartment even though to this day I still don’t have couches. No one in my family had money to give me, even if they did I wouldn’t have accepted it. No one in my family lived alone before. No one in my family taught me to drive I had to find a teacher. I did what had to be done and did it happily because I knew I was doing something right. I’m happy I did it, and I want to help guide my nieces if they want to follow a similar path. A question people have started to ask is that if I’ve met anyone yet, or if I plan on having kids. In all honesty I don’t have an answer to that, although at the moment I dont see that as a possibility.
Women have very little time to decide.
Men can take all the time in the world to decide and usually they are the ones who can change their minds later on. I’m forced to decide because the ability to have a child is so miraculous that we only get a small window of opportunity. I know I don’t need a child to be happy and maybe I will decide to grow a life from my womb and that will be the greatest act of my life. I have to decide. I love my life, I love my ups and downs, I love my heartbreaks and my joys.
After my miscarriage I had an epiphany.
I cried and cried and had no idea why. I didn’t plan it nor was I ready, it was really not the right time to have a baby anyway. I came to the realization that I was crying because I never knew I was pregnant and I never had an opportunity to decide to keep it or not. I know now that I don’t want to have a baby, maybe ever. I grieved it and I’ve grown from it. I will not feel pressured to decide by society, I refuse to feel pressured. Only I know what’s in my heart and right now I feel I have enough, and my choices are my contributions to the world by providing an example to my nieces.
scaredycat 