Part One: Career Girl Gone Bad

So my daydreams when I was younger generally didn't involve, well, babies. I was going to be a novelist or a mathematician or a lawyer or maybe the first woman on the moon. Actually I went through a phase where I really wanted to terraform Mars. I'm not kidding. Sure, I would have kids someday, of course, when I was good and ready and establisher in my career and could afford a nanny and whatever. Just like mom. (P.S. I love my mom and think she's this most awesome woman ever, so this is no dig at her.)

But when I met Husband, things started to change. I was in school studying biology, which, don't get me wrong, I still love, but... oh, it was slowly becoming clear that this was not a career I wanted to pursue. But what the hell was I going to do? At the same time, the baby itch was growing.

It took me years to figure out what was going on. I'd been getting encouragement for years from my parents and my teachers and pretty much everybody ever that I could be anything I wanted to be. A doctor! A teacher! The president! Yay feminism! Stay at home parent? Not even mentioned.  So it finally dawned on me that the reason I wasn't getting all excited about any particular job or subject was because I didn't want a career, I wanted a family.

Um, weird.





This is getting longer than I anticipated, so I'm going to split it into part. How many, who knows. So let's call this part one.