Christine, Wondering

Random Musings of a Human Becoming

Monday, June 11, 2007

Wants

Right now, I have a pretty clear idea of what I want from life in the coming years. I want to finish my degree, spend 1.5-2.5 years teaching in the south west of WA, then to go to London and teach there for an unspecified number of years. Then I want to come back to WA and teach in the south west again. Somewhere in all that I want to meet someone, fall in love and get married, and once I’m back in the south west I want to have kids, up to about 4 of them, who will go to the local primary then to a private high school.

That’s just a rough outline of what would be the absolute best pathway for me, as seen from right now (and as with all such things, is subject to change without notice).

But it leaves out something that I want, something that’s unlikely to the point of impossibility. That’s why it’s left out, of course, but I can’t help yearning for it. It is: to change the number of children to 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 . . . no more than 10, but more than 4.

Four is a good number – you can still fit them in an ordinary house or ordinary large car, they tend from what I’ve seen to have good dynamics, and the expenses won’t blow the budget. But I can’t help, deep down, really wanting a much larger family than the sensible ‘4’.

I want to be able to afford for my children the things I see as important: the ability to say ‘yes’ to sport / music / arts lessons if they ask for them, the ability to dress them normally and send them to good schools, the ability to take them on good holidays. And barring occasional rare cases, you just can’t do that with a big family on an ordinary couple’s salaries. And on the flipside, I don’t want to wind up with a family of kids who slave away at the family business after school or who can’t enjoy ordinary extracurricular stuff because they’ve got too many siblings. That’s very wrong in my books.

So . . . it’s a secret yearning, tucked quietly away where it can’t do any harm, and never to be satisfied. But it’s there nonetheless.

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