Are You Ready for This?

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This One's For the Pre-Mamas

Before you make any moves, there is one question you must, I repeat, must ask yourself: what do you want? One more time to make sure we are clear: What do you want?!

If you answer, “Oh, Lapin, c’mon, obviously I know what I want especially when it comes to the family I’ve been dreaming about since I was a kid.” Really? Well, then can you clearly articulate that dream in a one-line elevator pitch and then break it down into 1-, 3-, 5-, 7-, 10-year markers? No? Then, care to change your answer?

When people used to ask me any variation of “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I would get nervous — like palms sweaty, armpits definitely sweaty and a little nauseated. Because deep down I knew that I could not answer that question.

But the only way to quell the anxiety around that question was to answer it, for myself first. Which meant leveling with myself about what I really wanted out of my life, and when. Sure, I knew vaguely what I wanted... but I hedged by saying, “Well, that depends on if I meet someone” or “who knows what’s going to happen?” That’s bullshit. And that’s the enemy talking. More often than not the biggest enemy attacking our life goals lives between our ears.

We often diss our own dreams because we think they are not attainable or they suck or something else not true. Or, even worse, we are delusional and think we know what we want but aren’t specific enough to hold ourselves accountable to those goals.

When I finally took the time to ask myself what I really wanted out of life, I thought I already had it. I was killing it at work, and had become a boss (literally) — but I wasn’t treating myself like one. It was my own humming and hawing and qualifying my plans that left me feeling queasy about my life. My own life. The last person who should be queasy about it was me! And the antidote for that was to hunker down and buck up. To answer the damn question.

The Right Answer is to Write

In order to answer questions about your own life, you have to literally answer the questions. Like with a pen. Or a document on your computer. Or a note on your phone. I don’t care how you do it, I only care that you do it.

When I say “family planning,” you probably imagine a calendar where you tick off certain days of the month in which you’re more (or less) likely to get pregnant. You might think of tracking these fertile cycles to maximize your odds of pregnancy — or avoid it all together. But planning for family isn’t just about charts and graphs (although I do love me a good chart or graph) around your period. It’s about figuring out your innermost hopes and desires, defining them clearly and then grabbing them by the hooha (which, as my forever she-ro Betty White famously pointed out, is stronger and able to take the pounding that “balls” can’t).

Let’s start slowly:

• Do you want to get married? 


• Do you want to be married before you have a kid?

• Do you want to have kids? If so, when? 


• How many kids do you want? 


I’ll go first. Here were my answers to those questions a few years ago:

• Do you want to get married? Yes

• Do you want to be married before you have a kid? Yes

• Do you want to have kids? If so, when? Yes. Within the next 5 years.

• How many kids do you want? 5

I'll be honest. My answers to these questions have changed since I first did this exercise— and I'll be talking about that in future articles, but all I want you to know right now, is that your answers might change and that's okay. Life happens. Writing your answers down doesn't mean you're setting your future in stone; you're just laying the foundation to help you decide— and get— what you want.

Studies have shown that women who can create a cohesive narrative for their lives are more likely to be successful. Let’s figure out what your narrative is.

xo,

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