Recessionwire<\/a>)<\/p>\nWhen Marco got laid off in January, friends who knew of our family-launching plans asked us whether we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d continue or put things on hold. I just turned 40. Marco is seven years older than me. Our biological clocks are not in sync with the dipping of the Dow.<\/p>\n
Sure, it occurred to us for half a second that this might not be the wisest time to be spending my grandmother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s inheritance on fertility treatments not covered by health insurance, but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s expensive to adopt, too. And we really, really want a child.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
An extreme optimist\u00e2\u20ac\u201dor pragmatist\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmight argue that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no time like a recession to get knocked up. You spend the first four months nauseous, hence eating less: money saved! Girlfriends give you their hand-me-down maternity clothes, your hips expand; hence, shopping impulse curbed! You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have energy to go out at night, so restaurants and movies become less manageable: more money saved! Of course, all this is conjecture. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not there\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6yet.<\/p>\n
Instead, I live in a state of limbo fueled by hope, longing, and our intense desire. The hardest part, I find, is trying to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153relax\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stay calm\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u201d instructions that are difficult to follow when your laid-off husband is sticking a two-inch needle in your black-and-blue behind every day, the markets are tanking, and your hormones are running wild. I try to remind myself that stressed out couples have had babies in worse times than these. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Think of all the babies born in Europe during World War II!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d my mother says, trying to cheer me up.<\/p>\n
When my parents had me back in 1969, they earned $400 and spent $115 of it on rent. My mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s words of encouragement pour in weekly over the phone: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t stop. The economy will change. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not going to be like this forever. You have to be optimistic about it. You have to pursue your dreams.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Having gone through rounds of fertility treatment herself, the woman learned a thing or two.<\/p>\n
And it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true. You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t give up all your dreams just because the economy is rotten. Marco and I are even going forward with plans to find a little more space and move. As we wandered Brooklyn open houses the other weekend, imagining the kid\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s room and checking the front hallways of buildings for room to hang a stroller, we felt giddy. It didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t seem to matter that on every block a half-built building stood suspended mid-construction. We figured those bulldozers would be active again within a year.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153In racing, they say that your car goes where your eyes go.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d My mother reads me this passage from a book she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s reading, about a race car driver and his dog, called The Art of Racing in the Rain. <\/em>She sends the rest via email: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The driver who cannot tear his eyes away from the wall as he spins out of control will meet that wall; the driver who looks down the track as he feels his tires break free will regain control of his vehicle. Your car goes where your eyes go. Simply another way of saying that which you manifest is before you.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\nThat which you manifest is before you. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m trying to make that my new mantra. This morning, when Marco approached me with the hypo filled with my daily dose of progesterone, I found myself daydreaming about pushing a stroller in Park Slope, forgetting about the Dow, and riffing on the lyrics of that noxious Britney song: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Stick me baby, one more time.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
(Crossposted at Recessionwire) When Marco got laid off in January, friends who knew of our family-launching plans asked us whether we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d continue or put things on hold. I just turned 40. Marco is seven years older than me. Our biological clocks are not in sync with the dipping of the Dow. Sure, it occurred to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1902,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[131,8959,99],"class_list":["post-1535","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economy","tag-families","tag-relationships"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1902"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1535"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1535\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1535"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1535"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1535"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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