Nichole Celauro
First comes love. Then comes mortgage. Then comes the baby that will eat up what ever finances you have left for the rest of its life. Behold. The basic lifestyle formula of my peers.
Forgive me. I know it’s faux pas to think of a child as just another expensive obligation but… but yeah, I can’t seem to change the way I feel about kids. I don’t have the stamina, money, willpower or free time to dedicate myself to raising a tiny perpetually drunk person right now. Nor are my husband and I even a little bit willing to make any significant changes to our lifestyle in order to accommodate children.
I like my lifestyle. I’m going places. Literally. I’ve traded in my ovaries for a well-used passport. (Figuratively.)
Before the giant frat party we hosted to celebrate our union, my husband and I were already certain that we didn’t want children right away. Our precise reasoning? We’re selfish. Bringing a third person into this relationship to spend our hard earned cash and precious time on just didn’t fly with us. But you know what did? Virgin Airlines.
Also Read: I Spent 20 Years of My Life Travelling and I Learnt These 3 Things…
So instead of spending our honeymoon in a king sized bed overlooking a private beach trying to get knocked up, we went to Paris. And London. And Dublin. And Rome and Pompeii too. Our two week tour was an amazing, jammed packed with sightseeing experience in which we barely slept and ‘slept’. Yet, as we realized upon our return to that States, it was only a tiny fraction of where we see ourselves in the next ten years.
We felt a bit like Carl and Ellie. You know, the couple that grows heartbreakingly old together in the first ten minutes of Up, and then leaves you uncontrollably sobbing through the last eighty minutes of that stupidly cute movie. Adventure awaited us. And unlike Carl and Ellie – whose relationship played out like ‘don’t waste a single moment’ PSA to us – we were determined to grab our adventure by the hips and thrust ourselves into it.
Also Read: Read This if You Are Scared to Travel Alone
That’s when our ‘not right now’ attitude toward children shifted into a ‘nope, not ever’ policy. There’s just, forgive the cliche, too much to do! Too much to see! Too many people to meet and foods to binge and oceans to swim in. Instead of buying a dream home, we’ve decided to keep renting to avoid getting ourselves ‘stuck’ in one place. Instead of opening up a future college fund, we’ve got a piggy bank labeled ‘Japan’. And unlike my brother who constantly flip flops between regret for not having children sooner and regret for ‘settling down’ too early, I regret nothing.
So please refrain from looking at me with so much pity when I say we have no plans for children. Because I swear if one more young mother pats me on the shoulder and says, ‘Oh honey, I’m sure you’ll change your mind’ before whipping out another picture of her baby, then I will be forced to retaliate with slideshow dedicated to ‘That Time I Climbed a Volcano,’ with an encore by ‘Just Wait Till You Hear About How We Got Drunk in Paris!’
