Oftentimes, there is a look of shock, disappointment, or even disdain when we tell people that Lee and I aren’t planning to have kids. While it is a definite plus for so many wedding planning professionals to be able to stay at home with their kids during the week, that was never a part of our planning when I decided to start Magnolia Grove.
I have always been very career driven-- so much so, in fact, that we often joke that Lee would gladly be a 'stay at home dog dad' if given the opportunity. The reality of our lives is that we are both self-motivated business owners, who love to travel and invest nearly all of our additional time and energy back into our businesses.
While that leads to successful businesses, it can sometimes be discouraging to feel as though people think that we are doing something wrong by not being “conventional” and “normal”. As it is, I feel as though we don’t get to spend as much time as we would like with our four-legged children, that it’s nearly impossible to imagine the guilt we would feel about two-legged ones.
Believe me when I say that we have heard it all-- “you don’t know how to love until you’re a parent”, “you’ll regret it if you don’t try”, “you’ll come around eventually,” and my personal favorite-- “I thought you liked kids!?” While I am sure that these comments are meant well, they can still strike a nerve or two.
As someone who worked as a nanny for a decade before getting married, I assisted in the potty training, tutoring, fort building, and bedtime story reading of 15 kids at one time or another. While that is not to say that I completely know what goes into raising a child, I played a large part in several kids lives starting at a very early age, so to some extent, I feel as though I have already “done the parenting thing.”
In theory, Lee and I can choose to do whatever we want and it won’t be anyone’s business but our own, but society teaches us something different. If you are a newlywed who plans to have beautiful babies one day, we wish you all the happiness and joy in the world. And just because we don’t share that same timeline, doesn’t mean we’re any less of a family unit.