When I chose to enter the covenant of marriage with my husband in 2011, I knew I was making one of the best decisions of my life so far. Josh was-and continues to be-my best friend and most enthusiastic supporter, and I am constantly in awe of where life has taken us. The second-best decision I ever made was to become a mother. My husband and I became parents for the first time in May of 2016, and for the second time in April of 2018. Being “Mama and Daddy” has taken over such a significant part of our identities that we have a hard time remembering what life was like before children. But the truth is that we’ve spent the majority of our marriage without those titles. Although that time seems foreign to me now, I look back on it with thankfulness for the opportunity that we had to be just a couple. In the midst of that time, someone me told that “there’s no good time to have kids”; I completely agree. But I would also like to add my own caveat–some times are better than others. My husband and I chose to wait for a better time to have kids, which involved waiting for a few years after we were married. I’m not saying that waiting to have kids is the right path for everyone, but I would like to share 4 reasons why I’m glad it’s the one we chose–and why you may want to consider it as well.
1. We could focus on preparing for the future.
On our wedding day, I was 19 and my husband was 22. We were both still in college and figuring out how to function in society as adults. After getting married, we finished our bachelor’s degrees and teaching certifications in order to have a stable income and housing situation. Even after we graduated, we lived on a VERY limited income and it would’ve been exceedingly difficult to raise children in the situations I just mentioned. This isn’t to say that having children with a limited income is impossible–there are just some added stressors that we were hoping to mitigate by waiting. Looking back now, I can confidently say that it was a wise decision to wait to have children until we were financially prepared.
2. We came up with a parenting style (without using our own children as guinea pigs).
The opportunity to watch other parents raising their children was extremely valuable. We got to see strategies we wanted to implement as well as strategies we wanted to avoid. Our parenting style developed as a result of many intentional conversations in the early years of our marriage. Through these conversations we developed consistency in our goals for what we wanted our children to be as adults–people who walk with the Lord and function well in society. Josh and I are by NO MEANS perfect parents, but envisioning ourselves as parents in the early years of our marriage allowed us to become united in our parenting style
3. We had the freedom of irresponsibility.
This is not to say that Josh and I were irresponsible with our health, money, or other important aspects of life. As I touched on before, we had very little money which meant we couldn’t afford certain things. Food is one of the aspects of our early marriage that we look back on and laugh about because we definitely neglected nutrition for the sake of saving some money. It’s perfectly acceptable for two broke college students to live on ramen noodles and frozen pizzas; not so much to feed these things to your children every day. Once we graduated college and started to make more money it meant more responsibilities, but still not to the extent we would encounter as parents. It was of little consequence if we chose to stay out and sleep in late, or go several days (or weeks) without sufficiently cleaning the house. If you are a parent, you understand what I mean when I say that almost everything changed when we become parents for the first time–I had no idea that my responsibilities were going to multiply exponentially when I became a mama. I can be honest enough with myself to say that I was not ready to have those responsibilities when I was first married. The freedom of being able to find myself as a person before having children has given me the tools I need to be a better mother for my kids.
4. We built a relationship that we pray will be a positive example for our kids.
The years that we spent together as a married couple before having kids allowed us to work through a lot of our issues, some of which were significant. To be totally transparent, I am grateful that our children weren’t around to witness some of our knock-down-drag-out fights. We also began to work towards disagreeing without the conversation devolving into an argument. As the early years of our marriage progressed we grew up and became more confident as people, which caused us to be better partners for one another. The same processes of refining ourselves individually allowed us to become better parents. I’m a strong believer that a united marriage is one of the most precious gifts you can give your children, and I’m happy to say that waiting to have kids allowed us to give that gift.
I am not a marriage expert, nor am I a parenting expert; therefore I have zero authority to tell you if you should wait to have kids or not. In fact, I will tell you that waiting to have kids was very difficult at times because the Lord gave us both the desire to be parents. The only thing I can do is share why I am glad that Josh and I chose to spend our first years of marriage as a time of preparation for our future children. We wouldn’t be the parents we are today if we hadn’t given ourselves the grace to wait on the Lord’s timing. He used the early years of our marriage to refine us and and our relationship before we embarked on one of our greatest adventures together–being mama and daddy.