A Vote of Confidence

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I have great parents. The kind that always support you, no matter what crazy idea you come with (like when I wanted to move to Argentina for a year), while simultaneously not pressuring you to do something you don’t want to do. My husband also has great parents, the supportive type with no pressure. We are lucky.

A few nights ago, my husband and I were dining with his parents and discussing their 3 yr old grandchild, our nephew, when suddenly my father-in-law blurted out, “It would be nice if the grandchild had some cousins to play with.” And then he instantly apologized for being rude while my husband and I flubbered around with a response that went something like this, “well, um, we want to have children, and we’ve discussed the subject multiple times and we will, but, um, we don’t know when. Probably in the near future. In the next decade or so.”

NO ONE has ever asked me when or if I am going to have a baby. Not my parents, nor siblings, not my close friends or in-laws, until last night. I was starting to feel self-conscious about it. Is it because I’m a diabetic? Or is everyone just being polite? Are they frightened by me being pregnant? Or are they just trying to eliminate any pressure that they are so good at doing? Perhaps it’s because the only experiences they have with diabetes are negative. Julia Roberts in Steel Magnolias didn’t exactly portrait diabetes in a glamorous light. And the one other person in my immediate family, my aunt, died of complications from uncontrolled type 1 diabetes at age 28. Do they know that Type 1 diabetics can have successful pregnancies? And that many of them do. A successful pregnancy where the baby doesn’t come out 5 months early with an extra nipple and a missing arm.

Little known to my father-in-law, by him blurting out this question, it has given me the go ahead. It was as if he gave me a vote of confidence. I want to get pregnant. (and so does the mister.)