Being relatively newly married, just clocking into my 4th decade of life it’s fair to say I feel the social (and to a certain extent hormonal) pushes and pulls towards motherhood. However, I also very strongly feel the need to achieve more, see more, live more before I shackle myself to children and allow my priorities to shift. My husband is in a very similar boat, although arguably under less social pressure.
Naturally as millennials who have (successfully) moulded ourselves to the social and professional life timeline we want to ‘plan’ this next step. Annoyingly this just seems to have a few too many uncertainties, do you assume it might take a year/three/five - then we have overshot our ‘plan’. What if it happens right away? Where does that put me at work, our friends, our adventures as a family of two?
Having discussed these questions, both of us have started to learn more about our fertility in order to work out how we should factor it into our plans. We’ve both implemented and started to track simple lifestyle changes to try to maintain and improve fertility as well as discussing any potential interventions to consider if fertility does become a critical factor in our life plans.