I'm not sure what I expected for my life. But I swear it's all so unexpected.
You're young and you have so much love to give. You look for love and you find someone. You fall in love, hard. Your engaged and your planning this beautiful, fun, exciting wedding and the goal is to say "I do." You expect to love this person and for love to be enough. I mean, you can't imagine ever not loving this person. You can't imagine this person ever not loving you. So what is there to worry about? And then you are married and you realize love is so much but it's not everything. You realize marriage is not easy. Worth it, amazing, and a journey - but anything but easy.
When you enter the work force you have all these ideas about how important it is to love your job and to be fulfilled by it but that isn't always how it turns out. Maybe you go into it knowing it's just a paycheck but you're surprised by how much you enjoy your job.
You own a house and you have major expectations there - but your already spinning so many plates by this time that maybe you don't meet your own expectations here yet. Or maybe that is one of the plates you keep spinning.
Let's say you become a parent. You expect good days and bad days but you have no idea what all of it feels like until your in the middle of it all. And on the bad days you might think how unexpected your feelings are. You know what it feels like to love someone but you have no way to expect just how powerful the love you feel for you kids is. You have no way to know that the love you receive from them will feel as great as it does until you experience it.
Anyways, life is a big bowl of CRAZY. You set these expectations for yourself and your loved ones and your lives - whether you do so consciously or not - and sometimes they're met and exceeded but sometimes we fall short. Life ends up being not what we expected.
After finding out we were pregnant with Presley, I was shocked. Because that was one thing I didn't expect and didn't see coming. I don't think I got up off the toilet for several minutes after peeing on the pregnancy test. I sat and sat. I tried to absorb what this meant for us and tried to envision what in the world this meant for our future. After having Presley and PPD and a multitude of confusing feelings, I knew we were done having kids. Somewhere along the way we changed our minds and started to look forward to the idea of another child. And then we got pregnant and no matter how much we thought we wanted it - once that positive pops up on the test there is no going back. Enter freak out mode again. (I think I have commitment issues...)
After we brought Molly home and there were lots of scary sleepless nights and I turned to Tony and begged him to make a pact that we were not going to have any more kids because being so sleep deprived was terrifying!!! No doubt about it, we both agreed we were done. And yet again our hearts and minds were changed over time.
And we're having another baby!
Is this real life? Molly and Baby Duggan 3.0 will be about 27 months apart (while Presley and Molly are 28 months apart). All over again we are excited and nervous and worried and grateful. We've been around the block a time or two but never as a parent of THREE.... so while this isn't completely uncharted territory it still feels like a new hurdle. It's comforting having my sister just a few steps ahead of me here - she just had her third in December. I'm excited to go through all the changes right next to my family. Presley is so happy and can't wait to know if it's a boy or girl.
Anyways... expectations. Did I ever see this for myself - married with a third child on the way? Perhaps. But those were back in the days when I had no frame of reference. I had no idea how hard real life was. And don't let anyone have you pretending that life isn't hard. No matter your situation - married or single, parent or not, working or staying home.... sometimes it's just hard getting out of bed and putting on a happy face. (Like Mondays.) But it's all amazing. It's great. It is so different from the life we probably would have mapped out for ourselves.
You're young and you have so much love to give. You look for love and you find someone. You fall in love, hard. Your engaged and your planning this beautiful, fun, exciting wedding and the goal is to say "I do." You expect to love this person and for love to be enough. I mean, you can't imagine ever not loving this person. You can't imagine this person ever not loving you. So what is there to worry about? And then you are married and you realize love is so much but it's not everything. You realize marriage is not easy. Worth it, amazing, and a journey - but anything but easy.
When you enter the work force you have all these ideas about how important it is to love your job and to be fulfilled by it but that isn't always how it turns out. Maybe you go into it knowing it's just a paycheck but you're surprised by how much you enjoy your job.
You own a house and you have major expectations there - but your already spinning so many plates by this time that maybe you don't meet your own expectations here yet. Or maybe that is one of the plates you keep spinning.
Let's say you become a parent. You expect good days and bad days but you have no idea what all of it feels like until your in the middle of it all. And on the bad days you might think how unexpected your feelings are. You know what it feels like to love someone but you have no way to expect just how powerful the love you feel for you kids is. You have no way to know that the love you receive from them will feel as great as it does until you experience it.
Anyways, life is a big bowl of CRAZY. You set these expectations for yourself and your loved ones and your lives - whether you do so consciously or not - and sometimes they're met and exceeded but sometimes we fall short. Life ends up being not what we expected.
After finding out we were pregnant with Presley, I was shocked. Because that was one thing I didn't expect and didn't see coming. I don't think I got up off the toilet for several minutes after peeing on the pregnancy test. I sat and sat. I tried to absorb what this meant for us and tried to envision what in the world this meant for our future. After having Presley and PPD and a multitude of confusing feelings, I knew we were done having kids. Somewhere along the way we changed our minds and started to look forward to the idea of another child. And then we got pregnant and no matter how much we thought we wanted it - once that positive pops up on the test there is no going back. Enter freak out mode again. (I think I have commitment issues...)
After we brought Molly home and there were lots of scary sleepless nights and I turned to Tony and begged him to make a pact that we were not going to have any more kids because being so sleep deprived was terrifying!!! No doubt about it, we both agreed we were done. And yet again our hearts and minds were changed over time.
And we're having another baby!
Is this real life? Molly and Baby Duggan 3.0 will be about 27 months apart (while Presley and Molly are 28 months apart). All over again we are excited and nervous and worried and grateful. We've been around the block a time or two but never as a parent of THREE.... so while this isn't completely uncharted territory it still feels like a new hurdle. It's comforting having my sister just a few steps ahead of me here - she just had her third in December. I'm excited to go through all the changes right next to my family. Presley is so happy and can't wait to know if it's a boy or girl.
Anyways... expectations. Did I ever see this for myself - married with a third child on the way? Perhaps. But those were back in the days when I had no frame of reference. I had no idea how hard real life was. And don't let anyone have you pretending that life isn't hard. No matter your situation - married or single, parent or not, working or staying home.... sometimes it's just hard getting out of bed and putting on a happy face. (Like Mondays.) But it's all amazing. It's great. It is so different from the life we probably would have mapped out for ourselves.
Congratulations!!!! I can't believe I missed this until now! How egg-citing! :) :)
ReplyDeleteSo far it's been very pukey. Trying to hard to keep it all in perspective and praying the nausea subsides. Thank you so much for the congratulations!
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