About a year and a half ago, my husband Damien and I decided that, in spite of the fact that we’d always said we never wanted kids, we wanted, eventually, to have a baby. Our change of heart was based on several factors, certainly not the least of which was that we spent the summer visiting family, including our nieces and nephew, and we both felt overcome with how much we loved the little tykes and loved spending time with them. We regretted having lived so far away in Alaska for the past three years, and that we were moving far away from them, still, to Ohio. They had all been so tiny the last time we’d seen them, and who knew how big they’d be before we saw them again.

By the time we got settled in Ohio, I had started to feel like I’d been wrong all those years—I did want to be a mother. Having a little Jack or Paris or Katie of my own would be so worth the financial and emotional costs of childrearing. Damien, at first, wasn’t convinced. I let the issue drop, but he knew that I’d changed my mind and that I hoped that he would one day change his. I think just knowing that I wanted to have a baby, and remembering how exciting it was to watch as our nieces and nephews discovered the world and searched for their places in it, planted a seed in Damien’s mind that, within a few months, grew into baby longing.

So we agreed that we wanted to have a baby; what we couldn’t agree on was when we should do it. Damien had just begun a new master’s program, and I’d only just graduated with my MFA. I was teaching adjunct, Damien, working as a TA. We were making enough money to get by, but I had no insurance, nor could we afford insurance for a new baby. In addition, we had no idea how much raising a baby would cost. How much do diapers cost and how often do you have to buy them? Breast milk is free, but what about after the baby is weaned? How much do you end up spending per month on baby food, on clothes, on other necessities we hadn’t even factored in?

But on the other hand, we were already in our late twenties, and the world of academia is such that it would probably take years and years before one or the other of us could land a decent full time job with benefits. If we decided to wait until we were definitely financially stable, we’d probably be in our late thirties or possibly even forties by then. Aside from the risks of having a baby at a later age like that, we didn’t want to be the age of our child’s friends’ grandparents.

We put the discussion off for a year, and, that summer, after I interviewed for and didn’t get a full time job I’d been up for, it seemed the issue might be put off indefinitely. There was simply no good time to have a baby.

And yet people have babies all the time, people in even worse financial situations than we, and, somehow, they seem to manage just fine.

The following fall, when my birth control ran out, Damien and I had a long talk about the future. I pointed out that if we waited, we would probably end up waiting until it was too late, and that, if we were going to do it at all, now seemed as good a time as any. Damien was hesitant, but I believed we’d qualify for Medicaid, and my current job allowed me to teach online classes—it actually did seem like a pretty good time to start trying. So when my pills ran out, I didn’t go back in to renew the prescription, and about four months later, as easy as that, I was pregnant.

As soon as we found out I was pregnant, we looked up Medicaid and found out we made too much. Since then, thoughts of the baby—our excitement over her impending birth, our equal parts delight and fear about becoming parents, and our absolute dread of how we’re going to afford all these medical bills, which have been slowly building and building these past few months—have pretty much consumed us. Damien’s had to deal with this at the same time as working on his thesis at the same time as trying to figure out what his next step should be, since he’s graduating this June.

It’s been difficult, in other words, to keep up a good schedule of writing. I did somehow manage to spend about an average of one hour per day writing this past month, but that’s after three months of only writing for about a half hour a day (actually, in February, the month we got our first bill from the medical clinic—almost $1,000, just for one visit—I hardly wrote at all the entire month).

To be honest, though, I’m not too upset about it. I don’t want to lose what I’ve spent so many years developing, as a writer, but between the baby and the anticlimax of having my first book come out (by the way, I found out I was a pregnant the same week my first book was published; the two things will forever be linked in my mind), I seem to be looking at writing, the writing world, and my place in it a little differently. This post is already long enough as it is, so I won’t go in, just now, to this change in perspective, except to say that what once seemed absolutely vital, the most important thing in my life, suddenly seems like one of a number of important things. Writing is still on the stovetop, for sure, but, for the first time in, well, the first time in my entire life, I’d say, writing has taken a back burner to a few other things. And, unexpected though it is, this shift in priorities? It’s a strange sort of relief.