Well, as anyone who reads my blog or knows me in 3 D is aware I am very open about money. I think that by being open about money I can help other people as well as myself. I also find that being honest about money helps me spend within my means. Soooo here goes...
Part of me hopes that our son Peter never gives any more thought to how he came about than any other child does. The luxury of childhood is being unable to imagine a world without you at it's center. But I also do not plan on hiding how much work and sacrifice it took to get him here. If he wants to know about it he can, in detail appropriate for his age- just like any child who would ask how they got here.
If he asked me at age seven, I would say he cost more than a vacation but less than a house. If he asked me at eighteen, I would be open about how much it cost us in money and sacrifice. I gave up my career for a job in retail so that I could have a lifestyle more receptive to conception. I was a pastry chef, and as anyone who has ever worked in the restaurant industry knows, it is not a healthy lifestyle. The hours are long, you are never home, you are always eating either crap from a take out or overly rich food from work. It is stressful and physically and emotionally draining. Leaving the industry severely compromised our potential earnings as a family. Initially my husband and I decided that he would stay home and I would work, since I made more than he did but then we realized( guess how?) that he had waaaaaay more job security and decided I would be the one to stay home.
When we got serious about having a family I tried very hard to find a job in pastry that was not 70+ hours a week. Yeah, they don't exist. Competition for jobs as a pastry chef is extremely tight because there is less demand for them. Anyhow, I took a 60% pay cut before we even found out we were infertile. It took us three years to get pregnant, and that means I lost at minimum 68,000 dollars before we spent a dime on treatments. That is assuming I never got a raise. All those years of learning and studying and driving myself to exhaustion and student loans were all wiped away. All that sacrifice, and the only validation I ever got was my RE telling me that it was a good idea. Nice.
I know my father was ashamed to tell people I worked in retail. I actually enjoy retail, but there is no getting around the fact that it isn't one of those jobs that fills people with awe and respect. Unlike my cool pastry chef job. I am kind of joking about the cool part- I enjoyed it, but it was freaking grueling. I would not want my son to ever think that I sacrificed my career for him and am unhappy about it. Being a SAHM is a great joy. But I will surely use it to illustrate the point that a child is a huge responsibility and to be sure that he does not have children til he is good and ready.
When I calculate the cost of our family building I ALWAYS include my lost income, because I worked so freaking hard to become a chef and it is very, very difficult to break through the glass ceiling into management. As we realized that just maybe there was something wrong and that getting pregnant was not going to be as simple as it seemed initially, I tried different things. I started looking at my diet and changing it and slowly headed toward organics. Big money there. We spent five grand just to get pregnant, not including diagnostics or my switching to organic food and green cleaners and of course my forty dollar a month EPT habit.
I realize that five grand to get pregnant is a tiny ass drop in the bucket compared to some, but it was a lot to us.
Obviously we would never look on a child we conceived as a freebie differently- well except that we would be so relieved at the lifting of a financial pressure. If anything with male and female factor infertility I would consider that baby more of a miracle.
Finances have determined EVERY decision that we made. We took an income cut,we moved out of our home state, we chose a house that was cheap enough to pay for on one salary. Partially because we hoped I would be able to be a SAHM, but mostly because we had no idea how much it would cost us to have a child and were very afraid that we would be too house poor to fill our house. We live in a family friendly, run down, working class neighborhood. It's a great place but no one ever looked at this street and said WOW YOUR HOME IS GORGEOUS! In fact I remember telling my husband that I would
never buy this house. But we did. And thank God, because living below our means( and now with the recession and a child- WITHIN our means) meant we could spend eighty dollars a week just on co-pays. Ugh. Sometimes we feel guilty that we do not have a nicer and bigger home for Peter to play in. But we have Peter, and that is enough.
We always said that if we spent more than five grand in a year that we would stop and pursue adoption. Though I feel adoption is even more overwhelming and costly than medical treatments.
We have great medical coverage and that does help immensely. But there are so many out of pocket costs anyway, like gas and tolls and co-pays and extra vitamins.
I did briefly consider medical treatments abroad since I heard it was so much cheaper- but we decided to see how it went here first. Thank goodness, I don't know that I am organized enough to coordinate treatment abroad. That's a lie- there is no way I am organized enough to plan that kind of trip- I could not even plan our ELOPEMENT, my husband did it all.
What my husband and I are struggling with now is our desire to have another baby. Certainly an enviable position to be in. But still, knowing we will spend five grand minimum is enough to give us pause. We have a son to think of and care for. How can we justify spending that much money when we need to replace our ancient air conditioner and our equally ancient heating system? What if we spend that money and our heater dies? Then what will we do? Charge it? Then what? Five thousand dollars is a lot of dollars. And that is just to TRY. Just to try ONCE and give him a sister or a brother. No promises. What kind of parents are we that we could consider putting ourselves close to the financial edge just for a CHANCE?
So here we are, hoping for a natural pregnancy. Will we try at the RE's again? Yes. Is it a scary, scary thing? YES.
Visit Write Mind Open Heart for more perspectives on the Dollars and $ense of Family Building and to add your own link to the blog hop by May 1, should you want to contribute your thoughts.
