When I was 20, I was in my second year of college and still in that teenage phase of life where you hate everyone and everything. Everybody had it better than I did, everybody had things I wanted, and everyone was smarter than me. I think I also hated myself and I just felt awkward in every single situation I was in. Of course, none of this was true, but in my newly-20 lizard brain, it was true and I didn’t do anything to rectify my outlook in life. I just vibed with it and justified it because that was the easy thing to do.
Then I stumbled upon this blog of a young woman about my age who was already married and a mother. (If this was 1980 Kentucky, I wouldn’t be surprised. But this was 2010 outside of the suburbs of Lexington when only freaks did that sort of thing. The polite thing to do is to wait to get married until the weekend after you graduate college at age 22. Please have some self-respect).
I can’t recall her name or the blog title, though I still see it in my mind, but I remember devouring her content nonstop. She was an oracle. I wanted what she had - just to be a wife, mother, and homemaker. I enjoyed going to college but found it only met a certain level of need in my life. I wasn’t supremely fulfilled during my four years there. It was great, but it wasn’t great.
My lizard brain went into overdrive thinking there must be something wrong with me if I couldn’t find a husband and have at least one baby by 20. Never mind none of my peers were in relationships or married, but I was the weird one. But alas, I was in some cinderblock dorm, sweating in the summer heat while another woman a few states over was living the dream (she even finished college early!!!!).
Of course, I don’t know where this woman is today, if her marriage lasted, or if she had more babies. That was nearly twenty years ago. I hope wherever she is, she’s doing well and still married. I hope she’s still living the dream.
I tell that long story to tell you this one: I think many young women probably feel the same way I did, but we were afraid to admit it.
I’ve never been a fan of feminism as it’s been presented to us throughout recent decades. I’m talking about the feminism of the boss babe variety that tells you to get on the pill, get married to a job, and essentially function like a man. My moderately Baptist campus was filled with this “girls can be preachers, Jesus was a feminist”1 energy and I just wasn’t there for it. There were two sides to the coin: you could be a good Jesus feminist and rack up student debt or you could be an early wife and mother. Please choose.
And if I had met my now-husband nearly two decades ago and my only option was to drop out or get married to him and start a family, I would have dropped out without hesitation. Of course, these choices don’t necessarily exist in our present culture - you can do both. You can be married young and obtain a college education. Plenty of women do it, but it’s not presented as a viable option.
Frankly, all of my educational experiences (both undergrad and graduate level) pale in comparison to marriage and motherhood. No, I do not believe college is a waste of time (It’s only a waste if you lack vision, time management, and self-regulation), but it wasn’t this golden ticket that brought me intense meaning. Memorable experiences and opportunities (including meeting my husband at an academic conference)? Yes. Neverending fulfillment? No.
My exhortation is this: If you’re a young woman and reading this and you’re like me, desperately wanting family life at an early age - it’s fine. I think it’s incredibly normal to seek these bonds once we become adults because we are made for each other. Let’s normalize marriage and motherhood when we meet the right people, whether we’re 20 or 40.
In conclusion, I sometimes wonder if I had met my husband earlier, would we have had more time, more children by now? We can never know on this side of eternity, but I do know I’d choose it all a decade earlier if given the opportunity.
I guess they can, but I see no real evidence to support it in either the Old or New Testaments. Mary Magdalene running and telling the all-male disciples that Jesus was no longer in the tomb isn’t exactly pastoral leadership of a congregation. Trust me, I have like 30 academic credits in religion.
Great post. I'm a guy, so my perspective will be a little different, but I waited until my mid 30s to have kids — and in retrospect that was a mistake. It has imposed all sorts of limits on our family (number of kids we can realistically have being a big one), and will have huge long-term ramifications for our kids. For instance, if they also have kids late, we'll be too old to be the kind of highly proactive and materially supportive grandparents that we'd like to have (but don't). Like, can I be my grandkids' t ball coach at 75? Perhaps, or perhaps I'll be dead, who knows. Either way, though, I'm going to be very frank with my own kids about the tradeoffs of waiting. Maybe I'll even bookmark this post for 20 years and show it to them!
I became a mother at 23. Now many years later I'm extremely grateful because I cannot fathom how I would have the energy now that I had back then for a newborn/toddler. It was hard but I don't regret it at all. Becoming a mother made me grow the heck up and it has shaped me into the person I am today. It still creates some social difficulties, I'm younger than the parents of all my child's friends, sometimes by as much as 15 years. People my own age have young children or babies and I am so far past that phase now!