As a 'likely 2E' older mom, I think it took me longer to feel 'grown up enough' to make important life decisions - such as choosing a DH and becoming a parent. Could be my perfectionism for sure. Plus the world was always throwing me curve balls because I didn't know myself as a gifted person, and kept measuring myself against the standards of the people around me and making mistakes that I mercilessly took myself to task over.
You've taken this conversation in an interesting direction, because with the causation/correlation problem, I think it would be more instructive for people to share their stories about WHY they had children at the age they did.
In my case, I came from a poor family, and after a year of failing to put myself through college, I did a 6-year stint in the Navy. I quickly decided that the military life was completely unsuited to family life, and I refused to entertain the idea of a permanent family attachment during my enlistment, which was never going to go beyond the required 6 years. I met DW just about a year after my enlistment ended. We started out as friends for about half a year, lived together for about a year and a half, got married, and then conceived DD on purpose nearly two years after marriage.
So we basically knew each other for four years before bearing DD. And that timeline was under some pretty severe pressure... DW had endometriosis, and every doctor told us that one of the best treatments for that was pregnancy. But even though both of us felt strongly about having children, neither one of us was comfortable with the idea of having one before the time was right.
This allowed the condition to progress to the point where DW needed to have a hysterectomy following DD's birth, so it did limit us to the one child. But we otherwise refused to allow the condition to dictate our timeline. And looking back, it seems like it was the right decision. I think we needed that time together to build up our bond, so it could survive the period where DD consumed so much of our lives and left us very little for ourselves, nevermind each other.
Yeah... there are definitely some strains of perfectionism in that story.
