We Didn’t Wait on Purpose to Have Kids. But I’m Glad We Did.

Seven years. No babies. Just language exams, late-night seafood towers, and a crash course in international marriage.

A few days ago, I saw a clip of an older woman. She looked like someone who gives very little advice unless asked. But when her granddaughter did ask, she said this: Do not have a baby in the first year of marriage. We lived it. Not just the first year. The first seven. Seven years of marriage before our first child. No accident. No rush. Not even a real discussion about it until much later. It was not a plan. It just became the shape of our life.

When we got married, we were already deep in the Foreign Service life. Our relationship had already crossed oceans. We were used to packing our entire lives into suitcases and shipping them to cities we had never seen in person. We had already had long conversations on Skype at terrible hours. We had already said I love you in at least two different time zones and had to figure out what that actually meant once we were in the same place. Our first time living together was not in a cute apartment we picked out together. It was a State Department-issued unit in Washington, D.C. Not terrible. But not ours.