These are the big milestones I’ve wanted as long as I can remember: graduate high school, go off to college, start a career, get married, and have a baby. Not everyone takes this path in life of course, or even wants to, but these are the things I want.
So I’ve been bringing up the subject of starting a family to my husband for a while. I have grown used to his response “Someday Honey.” I know he wants children — I probably would not have married him if he did not. He is just not ready yet.
That is, he was just not ready until a recent a text conversation spanning 7,000 miles. My husband mentioned he was ready to start a family after the deployment.
At first I thought he was crazy, the Army is not a career for him and he will be done with his contract shortly after returning home. We have no idea where we will be living or working when that time comes. I might bring up the baby subject a lot, but surely this is not the right time for us.
Or is it? I know the reasons I’m ready to have a baby. I want to be a younger mother. I want four kids about two or three years apart and that takes time. My husband said that building our savings during this deployment would mean we would be more financially secure and ready to start our family.
That night I sat in our apartment in silence going over and over the conversation. When my fellow military spouses ask if we are going to have children, I usually say that we are waiting until after the Army to start our family.
Most of them look at me like I’m crazy and tell me how there are so many benefits to being pregnant while covered under Tricare. Perhaps that isn’t so far off base, I know medical bills can be expensive with a pregnancy. If we started our family while still covered by Tricare, we could be saving quite a bit of money. As someone who has recently become very interested in our personal finances that sounded like a win-win situation.
I took out a calendar and figured out down to the month when we must get pregnant by in order to be covered under Tricare. My husband was hoping to spend about six months of time together as just the two of us before trying to get pregnant but he saw the benefits of my plan. Babies were all I could think about. I was so excited that we had finally made it to this stage in our life!
Then a friend pointed out that we had been given incorrect information about our Tricare coverage. After a few Google searches and a phone call to Tricare I discovered that we would not still be covered nine months after my last possible “get pregnant” date like I had thought. We would not even be covered nine months after he got home. I was devastated, there is no way I would be willing to get pregnant when I don’t even know who our insurance provider would be, so our plans to start a family are again on the back burner.
My excitement has crashed down around me. But I’m still wondering: What made you decide it was the right time to get pregnant? Did you face any set backs with your timing? What else would you keep in mind if you were in our situation?
Guest blogger Andrea is a twenty-something Army wife married to a pretty awesome guy named Eric. Right now he’s hanging out in the desert overseas on his first deployment and Andrea taking care of things back in Georgia while working full time in the financial industry. Read more of Andrea’s blog here.
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I have heard from numerous spouses that deployment makes their spouse talk about having kids. They miss you and they see their friends pictures of their kids and they have a lot of time to think about what is important in life. I let my husband tell me he wanted kids throughout the entire deployment knowing when he got home he would change his mind and sure enough he did. Talk about it after he has been home about a month and then make your decision. If he is leaving the Army, wait until he finds a job. That's just my two cents.
Really good advice! Don't let him make you promises when hes not thinking straight. Let him come home and you guys talk about it. Sounds like he may have this romanticized notion of having a baby and that might not be the reality.
No job prospects, no home prospects, all equal or should equal, NO children prospects until????
I would definitely get the insurance situation figured out before you start trying, let alone another secured job. Has he thought about transitioning to the Reserves? At least then you'd be able to pay $197 out of pocket each month to get the equivalent of Tricare Standard, which is really inexpensive for family insurance.
We spent 7-8 months trying to get pregnant. Our plan had always been for him to get out when his contract was up, but after we had our beautiful baby girl we decided it was better to stay in. The idea of not having a guaranteed paycheck and no guarantee of insurance was too much for us to risk. So we have stayed in.
We waited to try to get pregnant until he was back from the desert for 7-8 months. Two reasons for this: transition from combat zone and into living as a married couple – he deployed a month after we got married and we married a short 61 days after we met, but we were also in our 30s and 10 years into our respective careers. the second reason is that we had a HI trip planned and wanted to do that (including alcohol, maybe scuba, and high altitude volcanoes, never mind morning sickness) without being pregnant. I decided on our trip to HI that I wanted to try then, but my husband made us stick to the plan, which is good, as I got pregnant the next month when we started trying, but miscarried at 7 weeks and would have blamed myself if I had gotten pregnant while doing those things in HI. My piece of advice is to have all your ducks in a row – insurance, childcare, etc before you try to get pregnant – it will alleviate stress and keep you out of the poorhouse. A ******* delivery is contracted by insurance for $6-8000 and a csection is contracted for $8-10,000 – uninsured, you will pay much more than that for a non-complicated pregnancy. Add In preeclampsia, placenta previa and bleeding, preterm labor, or any other complication and it reaches $30-100,000+ depending on outcome for you and your baby. I completely understand the desire to get to it, as I urgently wanted to be a mom for 15+ years before it happened, but in my experience, both of you need to be on the same page and have your ducks in a row to alleviate some stress, as being a parent can be the most stressful thing in your life, even as it is also the most wonderful. Just my two cents.
We waited to try to get pregnant until he was back from the desert for 7-8 months. Two reasons for this: transition from combat zone and into living as a married couple – he deployed a month after we got married and we married a short 61 days after we met, but we were also in our 30s and 10 years into our respective careers. the second reason is that we had a HI trip planned and wanted to do that (including alcohol, maybe scuba, and high altitude volcanoes, never mind morning sickness) without being pregnant. I decided on our trip to HI that I wanted to try then, but my husband made us stick to the plan, which is good, as I got pregnant the next month when we started trying, but miscarried at 7 weeks and would have blamed myself if I had gotten pregnant while doing those things in HI. My piece of advice is to have all your ducks in a row – insurance, childcare, etc before you try to get pregnant – it will alleviate stress and keep you out of the poorhouse. A ******* delivery is contracted by insurance for $6-8000 and a csection is contracted for $8-10,000 – uninsured, you will pay much more than that for a non-complicated pregnancy. Add In preeclampsia, placenta previa and bleeding, preterm labor, or any other complication and it reaches $30-100,000+ depending on outcome for you and your baby. I completely understand the desire to get to it, as I urgently wanted to be a mom for 15+ years before it happened, but in my experience, both of you need to be on the same page and have your ducks in a row to alleviate some stress, as being a parent can be the most stressful thing in your life, even as it is also the most wonderful. Just my two cents.
From our own experience I would advise:
1.) Don't underestimate the stress of the readjustments that you will be making when he comes home. Give yourselves some time.
2.) Don't presume Tricare is better than other insurance plans you may be eligible for in the private sector. It certainly wasn't in our case.
I wouldnt do it. So many people think theyre ready for life outside the military only to find out theyre woefully wrong. Things don't always go according to plan. You've got to be willing to roll with the punches sometimes. If the insurance is stopping you and not the baby costs itself I would wait until youre more financially prepared. Babies are effing expensive!! Wait til you get settled in your new life and then try again if you guys still want that.
I can't relate to trying to plan a pregnancy around ETSing from the military, but I can relate to trying to plan it, period. I wrote this exact same post here at SpouseBUZZ 5 1/2 years ago…and three years and three miscarriages later, I finally had a baby.
I would never discount planning; I am still a huge planner. But the first time I "tried" to conceive a baby, I expected to be delivering one 9 months later. It didn't happen for me, and all my plans blew up in my face. And here I am, having tried again for another 18 months and another three miscarriages to have a second baby and I am getting ready to do IVF.
When I wrote that post here 5 1/2 years ago, I never in a million years would've guessed that we would be a couple who'd have to do IVF. None of us have any idea how easy or hard it will be for us to start a family until we actually start trying. I arbitrarily set deadlines to wait until the timing was right and and finances were perfect, and it backfired enormously in my case. So I can only speak honestly and perhaps a tad bluntly — having struggled for so long to build our family, and spending many years wondering if it would ever happen at all — that if having children is important to you (especially four of them), you might want to sit down as a couple and consider making it a priority instead of a "someday, honey." Sadly, someday takes a very long time to come for some of us…
Good luck to you! I hope you're one of those people who gets pregnant on your first try ;)
No one can tell someone what to do in this scenerio, but if it were me I would wait until my husband and I were stable and had a solid plan in place before having a child. During deployment emotions are running high and it can cloud your judgement; you're not thinking of logistics or finances or the future, you're thinking "I love you and I want to have a baby with you." Honestly I can't think of a worse time to get pregnant than right before/during military separation because so many things are up in the air. You'll need housing. Insurance. Jobs. Savings. Childcare. The list goes on. All those perks the military provides will be kicked out from under you. You might not be able to secure all these things in time for your baby to arrive and that can cause all kinds of emotional and financial stress.
Basically my advice is to wait. You, your husband and your future child deserve stability, and I think it would be well worth it to get all your ducks in a row before making that leap.
It seems like such a good idea to wait until everything is set up perfectly…until you start trying and aren't able to get pregnant or to carry a child to term. There's never a perfect time to have a child, but its quite painful when you are in that "perfect" life situation, and struggle to have one. So, I'd advise not waiting, as this scenario is more common than we'd think.