Lynn Ruth Miller laments marriage, money and motherhood

Procrastination

Why didn’t I know about this in time? These days you can freeze your eggs and you don’t have to have the baby until you are ready to be a mum!

I have always wanted to be a mother, and if I had been born 60 years later than I was in 1933, I could have actually had a baby. I would have saved my money and done some serious shopping for a delightful and responsible sperm.

Getting the right daddy in my day would have been far more arduous than it is today. ‘Nice’ girls stayed pure until they married, and those very girls were the ones who wanted to mother little babies. Everyone knows that you can’t get the true measure of a person until you’ve lived with them for at least a year … and when we lived with a guy, we were stuck with him for the rest of our lives. If he wasn’t the right one to father
our babies, we were out of luck.

When we lived with a guy, we were stuck with him for the rest of our lives

Even so, I often wonder what my life would have been if I had frozen my eggs until I found the right guy to father my child.

I have to say that all my friends who actually lived my dream are not in nearly as much bliss as I believed they would be. My friend Ellen is supposed to be retired. Her husband said, “Now is our time; we can travel
all over the world!” and she said, “I can’t do that. I have to take care of the grandchildren.”

And that is all that she does. She is living exactly the same life she did before she retired, caring for her children, cooking, cleaning and supporting her two sons and their families.

I like to think I would not have been like Ellen. My children would not have depended on me after they had grown into the well-adjusted adults I knew they could be, and we would all have gone adventuring together once they were grown. It is a gorgeous dream, and I pull it up every time I see a darling child holding their granny’s hand and adoring her.

I always tell my little poodle, Donald, “If I had been born in this day and age, you would have only had two legs and could have answered the phone, run my errands and give me grandchildren.”

And he says, “If I would have been a little boy, I would have done drugs, dated all the girls you didn’t approve of and would have been embarrassed to sit on your lap when you got depressed.”

Poodles are so realistic.

“Procrastination is like a credit card; it’s a lot of fun until you get the bill.”
– Christopher Parker