Life is a game, play it.

Life has been one of my favorite games for a long time, and I'm just now remembering, its the game Dan and I played on our first date back on November 25th, 2006 (His one concession to forcing me to eat dinner with his family and watch USC crush Notre Dame that night).

The one thing I dislike about Life though, is that it frequently causes me to relive one of my fears-having children. Its not the idea of having kids of my own that scares me, I desperately want to have a family-a big one if possible. Its the reality of the actually having children that is more terrifying. I'm not talking about the being pregnant/giving birth thing (although after reading too many of my cousin's "things no one tells you about giving birth" pins on pinterest that whole ordeal is a lot scarier), its the actually being able to get pregnant and the aftermath that is more scary. It took my parents a long time to get pregnant with me, they were actually beginning to process of adoption when my mom found out she was pregnant-after about 3 years of trying. It was clearly easier with my brothers seeing as we're all the desired 2 years apart.  So the ability to get pregnant part is terrifying, but then I also start to think about the genes that I likely carry. Autism is undoubtedly genetically linked, but we don't know exactly how. One theory is that its through the father, but my dad and his sister both have autistic children so that's not necessarily true in our family. I definitely believe in the idea of a sliding scale of Autism, so its a matter of how severe whatever Autistic traits are in the genes I carry versus what Dan has (no history of Autism in his family so that's positive). Even scarier than Autism though is the history of mental illness that runs in both of our families. Honestly I think my parents will tell you its been harder to raise my non-Autistic brother over the last 15 years than it has my Autistic brother. There is a lot more uncertainty and lack of control I think with mental illness than with Autism, and uncertainty is number 2 on my things I'm afraid of list (number 1 being failure).

So back to our game. The first picture below is how I ended up retiring. I started off in college, became a salesperson earning 100K every payday, got married, was (un?)lucky enough to draw the mobile home card which was cheap, but I could have actually afforded something a little nicer this time. Just like in almost every game of life I play, I managed to skip over every single baby space save the first "baby girl" space. After my midlife crisis of becoming a teacher and taking an $80,000 pay cut (at least the mobile home made more sense), I retired at Millionaire Acres with $2.98 million after cashing in my life chips. Dan's life however, was pretty different. He graduated college and decided to become an accountant (ironic given my family's careers and the fact that I'm in charge of the bills here) who earns $60k, good starting salary-right Melissa?! Too bad promotions don't exist. He also got married and drew the very acceptable Log Cabin house card. And then the kids came....and kept coming....twin girls (his gender choice) followed by a girl and another girl and finally a boy (they just had to keep trying to get a boy!) He also retired at Millionaire Acres to try to give me a run for my money (haha), but only ended up with $1.905 million.

I won the game by a landslide...but did I really? If you ask me, I'd much rather have Dan's life.