Love and Marriage...and Motherhood

In my teen years, I was sure I’d be married by the age of 20 and having kids by 21-22.  It was my life’s goal to be a stay at home mom.  I remember sitting there on my 20th birthday thinking, “Well, that didn’t go as planned.”  By that point, however, I had stopped looking for ‘the one’ and was actually actively trying not to date.  I had been so burned by my last relationship, I didn’t want to have anything to do with dating until after college.  Being who I was back then, I made a promise to God that I wouldn’t date in college.  I made a lot of promises to God like that.  I don’t know how many of them I actually kept through till the end.  Not many, I’m sure.  

I am an extreme person in that I can’t do anything halfway.  Have my heart broken by a boy?  Why not swear off guys for 4+ years and add an extra-heaping helping of inevitable guilt by making a promise  to God that I’ll give this time of my life to Him?  
I didn’t make it, by the way.  

I fell in love with my husband just after spring break my Sophomore year in college.  We got married the August after I graduated.  
I fought falling in love with him for months.  I explained to him that I had promised God to not date until after college.  He said he understood.  I’m sure he thought I was nuts.  If I was him, I’d have just moved on.  He waited.  About a month or two into it, I caved and realized it was futile.  Who was I kidding?  We were dating even if we weren’t calling it that.  We now agree that we truly started dating in April of 2006.  

He was the constant source of light in my life at a time when everything started to crash down around me.  Everything I held dear up until then seemingly abandoned me.  
My faith was shaken to the core.  No.  Not shaken. Broken.  Obliterated.  Not only my faith in God, but my faith in people.  In humanity.  The thought that people, at the heart, are good.  Especially Christians.  Being brought up as a Christian, I always believed that we were supposed to constantly be striving to be better people.  I was sorely mistaken and that was a hard lesson to learn.  
I am only now starting to rebuild what was torn down.  Starting to see the good in humanity again.  I have my husband to thank for that.  First, for his sickeningly optimistic attitude about nearly everything and secondly for helping me to bring life into the world.  Twice!

When we found out that I was pregnant with our first child, we were shocked to say the least.  I knew in my heart that I wouldn’t be able to stay home when our child was born.  We hadn’t even been married a year and were pretty much dirt poor.
I held out hope, though.  Even going into maternity leave, there was part of me that still believed I’d never return to work.  The day I realized we couldn’t make it work with one income was a very hard day for me.  I held my little baby boy and cried.  I wanted to be the one to take care of him.  It was my one goal and I was failing miserably.  

I was starting to finally get in the swing of things.  It took 9 months, but I was finally feeling like I was balancing mothering and work and being a wife when the last one got the better of us and I found myself pregnant. Again.  If I thought I was shocked the first time around, the second was...ummm...what’s more shocking than shocking?  I was actually terrified for a while.  After I got up the courage to tell Scott, we waited a little while to tell anyone else.  Mostly because we didn’t want to hear the inevitable, “Again?! So soon?  You know how that happens, right?  I thought You’d figured it out the first time.”  Blah blah blah. 

It didn’t matter, though.   Our daughter completed our little family.  While I was pregnant with her, my husband was promoted at work which meant that we could now squeak by on his salary alone.  I had finally reached my goal as a stay at home mom!  The funny thing about reaching a goal, though.  Now I have to figure out what to do next.  Obviously, raise my children.  However, I never really looked past the whole stay at home mom thing.  It didn't occur to me that it would end decently soon.  20 years max.   


What then?  

What do I want to be when my kids grow up?