"But you're so young!"

Over the past year or so, I've started to tell people in my life about my plans to pursue single motherhood by choice and the one comment that has come up pretty consistently has been about my age- about being "so young, " having "so much time," etc.  There are times where I start to doubt my plan and I do find myself thinking "yeah, maybe I am too young, maybe I can wait longer."  That being said, I do have my reasons for choosing to move forward with this at the "very young age" of 30.  So, here are some of my thoughts around the age thing:

1.  I wonder if anyone would think that a 30-year-old couple is too young to have a baby.

2.  No one really knows how easy or difficult it is going to be to get pregnant until they start trying.  Maybe I do have many childbearing years ahead of me, maybe I don't.  It's certainly not something I've tried before :) I don't have any known fertility issues, but there has been a question about whether or not I have endometriosis and I have at least one uterine fibroid.  While this is not an immediate cause for concern, I find myself wondering what the status of these things will be in a few years.

3.  It is simply more difficult to conceive with frozen sperm.  The timing has to be right.  You get one chance per cycle unless you have the money to pay for more.  The reproductive endocrinologist's office that I am working with says that the monthly fertility rate for humans with no intervention is 25% and that their office has had about a 12% success rate per month for women using donor insemination.  Granted, they are probably working with some older women and with women who have known fertility issues.  I have read more hopeful numbers other places.  However, it's pretty well known that there is a fertility decline at the age of 35.

4.  This one may sound nuts, but I have always wanted to have two children.  At this point, that is probably pretty unlikely, so I'm not getting my hopes up.  I will also not be devastated if I can't have two, but I'm not ready to shut the door on it just yet.  I do know that I would need two children to be spaced far apart in age.  Like, the older one would need to be in school.  So, I feel like the longer I wait to have #1, the more I am closing the door on #2 and on their chance to have a sibling.

5.  If the girls on "16-And-Pregnant" can do it, so can I.

6.  I have kept my cats alive for nearly eight years.

Ok, 5 and 6 are a joke, but seriously, I see women in much worse positions than myself raise children.

Basically, I do think that 30 is young, but I also feel that waiting is taking a gamble.  If I had a good reason to wait, I would.  I wouldn't try to have a baby if I wasn't emotionally or financially ready or if I had some major thing that I had to accomplish first.  Everything else that I hope to do in my life does not have the kind of time limit on it that having a baby does.  Also, I firmly believe that however stressful parenting may be, it will not compare to the grief I will experience if I am never able to have a child.

So, I guess I'm writing this so that I can come back and remind myself of all of these things when I have those moments of doubt and also in case anyone was wondering why I would do such crazy thing at such a young age.