The Parenting

I've been thinking about this post for too long now so that it doesn't make sense in my head anymore. It's about the parents I think we will be and what we have to offer a child.

I think we will be good parents; mostly because we have good parents. Our friends are good parents. Good is a subjective term, but I'm encompassing the basic needs of the child (children) with what C and I think is important: opportunities to learn and grow. I don't judge many people as bad parents because we all make mistakes in every capacity, including parenting. I assume that we'll learn and grow as parents when a baby provides us the opportunity to do so.

I don't think we deserve or don't deserve to be parents, especially based on whether we'll be good or horrible parents. What keeps running through my head are the *theoretical* people that ask why we want to have children or comment that we're so young and why can't we wait. I feel compelled to answer them or at least have a response for myself. I don't think the answer or response are found in trying to figure out if we'll be good parents; I think it lies with what we have to offer.

There is a long list of things that we can't give a child, but most of these fall under the seriously-unnecessary-tangibles category. We can give children a safe home where their needs are met. We can give them love and a sense of what family really is. We can lead through example on how to be nice, share, and shape their larger values and morals. We can teach them that numbers are just as good as letters because they will have a parent that works with each. We can offer them more family that will be madly in love with them than they'll know what to do with (ie. Almost a Baby Girl).

Sometime in the last two years I came to a point where I couldn't imagine a world where there wasn't a child with C's face or my freckles. Now that I'm there and I've been there for awhile, the desire only deepens to create this child that is ours. We almost had one and now we're trying again with no idea when this will happen for us. It's not the time that hurts so much, it's the very idea that we might not have the opportunity to share all of us in the process of creating someone. I can't imagine not giving C his children or handing a baby to our parents. It's not a feasible situation.