First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes ... college?

So I have to tell you that when I got married at the tender age of barely 21 to another young 21 year old I pretty much thought I had my life figured out.

Get married young (21 yrs old – done).Then buy a house, start within a year or two to have babies, give birth to 4 perfect children by the time I was 30 years of age, stay home and raise them, perhaps adopt a couple more, support my husband through whatever came his way and live happily ever after … the end. How hard could it possibly be to just exist as a normal little family.

Hmmmmm. Apparently harder than I thought.

By our second anniversary we had accomplished the first 2 items on our list and thought we were well on our way to getting number 3 started… what happened? Well, not number 3. Wally and I didn’t ever ‘try’ to make the baby thing happen, we just wanted to see what would happen if we didn’t try to not make things happen. Make sense? I mean I had always desperately wanted to be a mother – it was my only real goal in life. I didn’t go to school because of it. I always thought ‘Why go into debt for an education I’ll never use? I’m going to stay home and be a mommy, that’s all I want’. However with that being said we never wanted to force things to happen either. We had watched different couples focus on getting pregnant so much that it seemed they forgot why they were together in the first place. A close relative of mine had ended up with triplets (at age 27) after starting the fertility process shortly after pursuing pregnancy, five years later they had another child all on their own. I’d also witnessed an aunt and uncle try to get pregnant for 10 years and in the end adopted a beautiful little girl from China. Ten years of heartache and abuse on her poor body, and no doubt strain in their marriage. Not to mention the fact that he was older than her by several years with 2 grown children, time wasn’t exactly on their side - it was good that they adopted when they did.

Wally and I just never wanted to lose sight of what was best for us as a couple or each other as individuals. So after a couple of years of waiting ‘to see what would happen’, we realized that we may never get pregnant. We then made a decision. No, we didn’t go through tests or go to doctors to find out who was ‘broken’. Nor did we make a decision to let everyone know what was going on so they could stop pestering us about having children or feel dreadfully sorry for us, or give us unwanted advice. Instead we re-evaluated things…

Wally was at this time working at a pig barn. You see Wally is not the kind of guy, (if you know him) that you would expect to be able to work in a pig barn. But for me he did, to save his marriage he did. (There is sooooo much more that goes with this story that will have to be shared in another post or two). I knew he wasn’t happy and I was finally ready to help him make a change. I begged him to go back to school. I knew that if we were going to adopt someday in order to have the family we always wanted that he would need an education that could provide a job that he could do with all of his heart and abilities. (I want to say clearly I don’ think that there is anything at all with working in a pig barn but this was not Wally’s dream or where his gifts were, he wasn’t really happy, just coping – I can’t settle for coping).

This was sort of a big step for me - to push Wally back to school. This would mean that for the next 3 years I would have to continue to work fulltime and put aside my hopes of a family for a bit longer. I’ll admit though it took a while for me to get to this point. I tried to just focus on him and his happiness (and of course mine too in the end). I knew that if he wasn’t doing a job that he got some sort of satisfaction out of he wouldn’t be as good of a dad or husband as he could be at a job that he felt more fitted to.

So after a few months of pondering and pushing Wally agreed to go back to school. For him, for me, and for our future.