To have children or to not have children....that was the question!!

When I was nineteen I made the decision that I was not going to have children.  After ten years I had finally come to terms and found peace with my mother's death.  She passed away when I was nine of breast cancer and it took me ten years to find contentment and peace with my life.  Ten years to figure out that that slight bit of sadness pushed away in the back of my heart wasn't just apart of life and did not have to be there forever.  I gained valuable tools to manage the sadness when people asked about her or the situations when a mother's advice will only suffice.  Something changed, instead of thinking of all the years she would not be apart of my life, it became how blessed and thankful I was to have her for the nine years that she was apart of my life.

After I became newly enlightened I decided not the have children.....EVER.  My familial history puts me at a greater risk of someday having cancer and there was no way I would want to put my children through an ounce of sadness that I endured.  How naive I was at nineteen?  To think I had any control on what would unfold 10, 20, 30 years from that point.  I didn't think I would meet such an amazing man that would change my whole outlook on life.  Of course, I would want to have children with this man.  Like me, my children will have a wonderful father to raise them if anything were to ever happen to me.  And let's not even mention the extended family I have been so lucky to inherit with becoming a Bradshaw.  Sadness will somehow be apart of my children's lives whether I am here to help them through it or not.  I cannot protect them every bump in the road because hard times will inevitably make them stronger and more resilient in life.

So, the moral of this post.....nineteen is not the age to make drastic decision on whether to have children because really I was just trying to decide whether "to go to Biology class or to not go to Biology class"