When I was in my early twenties and pictured having a baby one day — a day that felt, from that vantage point, way off in the inconceivably distant future — that picture included things like a house. A job that made money. Probably a nursery furnished entirely from the Pottery Barn Kids catalog. What my life actually looked like when my husband, Kendrick, and I decided to have a baby wasn’t quite like that.
We were married and both twenty-nine years old, so we had a couple of points ticked off on the Is It Socially Acceptable To Have A Baby Now? checklist. But we were also living in Manhattan in a fourth-floor walk-up conveniently located on top of a massive construction zone (a two-bedroom only if you considered the wide-ish hallway a second bedroom, which we did to make ourselves feel better). I had yet to see the style website that I’d recently started, Ramshackle Glam, turn a profit; we were surviving on Kendrick’s salary from a job that barely covered our rent, let alone things like diapers and formula, and that he hated so much that he was definitely going to have to figure out something else to do sometime very soon. We were still going out too late on Friday (and Saturday, and probably Sunday) nights; we were starting to tire of our hard-partying lifestyle, but “settled down” isn’t an expression I would have used to describe us.
Read the rest of my story today on Medium, part of their series on Working Parents in America.
P.S. I didn’t title this article, by the way. Just in case you thought I was calling myself a Superwoman; I’m really not. If you read the piece, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
