Divorced Before 30

After my would-be anniversary, I finally got some professional help. I found a kind, insightful therapist whose office was just a short walk from mine. I relished these breaks from work and wished I could just stay in the quiet waiting room, drinking tea and flipping through magazines. During my walks back through Dinkytown, I would process what we’d talked about, and by the time I got back to my office, I usually felt okay. Good even.

In therapy, I got to babble on about all the junk that had been weighing me down—guilt about my divorce, frustration about my career, and anxiety about my biological clock. More and more, I realized how much I’d been worrying about my ability to have kids. There were many things in life that I couldn’t control, but I realized that I could dig a little deeper into my fertility issues. I didn’t want to wait until I was ready to have kids to find out what challenges I might face.

So, proactive one that I am, I went to see a specialist at the university. She checked my hormone levels and ordered an ovarian ultrasound to follow up on the polycystic ovary syndrome diagnosis I’d been given back in Illinois. Everything came back normal, which was a relief, but I still didn’t know why I couldn’t have a cycle on my own. Since my divorce, I’d gone back on the pill anyway, but still.

All of this fertility business got me thinking—it might be a good idea to see exactly where my boyfriend stood on the whole baby-making issue before we bought a house together. You know, since I was already envisioning us with a passel of tots—beanpoles, no doubt. Little scientists or writers, basketball players or runners, or maybe kids who would blaze their own trails and teach us new things.

The opportunity to talk arose one sticky July evening as Josh and I walked Tucker on a loop through my neighborhood, mostly as a reprieve from my stuffy apartment. What began as a casual stroll turned into a rather epic conversation.

“Honey?” I started. “I need to ask you something before we buy a place together.” Does anything strike fear in a man’s heart more than a Big Talk? But I forged ahead. “You want to have kids, right?” I knew he wanted to have kids—I’d seen his list of baby names, for God’s sake. He nodded. “MmmHmm.”

That’s how the conversation started, but if he read between the lines—and I’m sure that he did—it went a little deeper. I wasn’t just asking, after all, if he wanted to have kids in general. I was asking if he wanted to have them with me, the woman with whom he hoped to own a house soon.

I proceeded with caution, “Well, when, exactly, do you see that happening?” He had to think about that for a while, but eventually, he said, “I don’t know—maybe three to five years?” Three to five years. A perfectly reasonable timeframe for a thirty-year-old guy who’d been dating someone for eight months. So why did I feel so damn disappointed?