The Glamorous Life?

Living childless in the suburbs can be lonely. Most of the friends we've made in our neighborhood have small children and they have friends in the neighborhood with children the same age, so we don't exactly fit in or get many invites to birthday parties, family-friendly barbecues or game night.

I think they may have this glamorized picture of the child free as partying every weekend night till the wee hours of the morning and then sleeping off our hangovers all day long on Sunday or Jet setting to some exotic local. That is not exactly the life we have or want. My husband and I enjoy quiet nights out on our deck, listening to music, sipping wine and when weather permits, a nice fire...hardly the club scene. Most nights, even on the weekends, we are asleep no later than 10 pm...boring by some standards, but it works for us.

In accepting that we aren't going to have children, I've been doing a lot of soul-searching lately about what I will  do with my life now that I'm not going to be a mother, and I guess the answer is that I will  be doing pretty much the same as I am now, it's just finding the time to do everything I would love to do and also put away the chatter in my head that I've had for the last 12 years about all the things I've put off in waiting for a baby to come. The upside in all of this, is that I’ll most likely still enjoy this freedom ten years from now when my children would have been hitting their teen years and I would have been seriously considering running away. 

So while we won’t be sustaining the stereotype of the jet-setting child free couple, we will be doing something important; we’ll be making the most of what’s turning out to be a very satisfying, if not especially glamorous, life.