I am Jaime Hadley, a twenty-two year old with a husband and baby boy.

I am in a place in life that I never anticipated - happily married, sharing my quirks and qualms with a patient man who continues to make me laugh.

My husband John and I were two weeks past our whirlwind engagement when we realized that we were having a baby. Though naysayers would (incorrectly) argue that we married because of the pregnancy, I proudly attest that John Michael was simply a bonus after we had made the decision to spend our lives together.

From what I read in books, intellectual and independent women do not need a husband or children. The heroines of the ones worth reading tend to find love accidently, after retiring from multi-million corporations and traversing France (thank you Danielle Steel). I will still be the first to jump up and defend women (and men) who choose to remain single and to spout the theories on waiting until your thirties to begin a serious relationship. So, no, I do not need my family, but I want them. My husband, my son, and my (hopeful) children to come, I want them all.

I thought for the longest time that I had to be a stereotype. Get married young and fast, be miserable and unfulfilled, or avoid a serious relationship and become an ideal version of myself. I thought that marriage meant disappointment, disillusion, and discontent. How glad I am to have been proven wrong.

What John and I have is not stereotypical. Our life and relationship will not fit in box, and I have learned that a successful relationship is worked for and well earned.

Laughter, joy, conflict, and frustration join us every day, and together we forge a better life than I could have imagined alone. One day I plan to write my own book, and perhaps the heroine will be twenty-two, married with one child, figuring out her passion and dreams one day at a time.