As we inch closer and closer to our wedding day, I catch my thoughts darting in a million different directions. “What cake flavor will we pick?”; “Will all of our vendors show up on the big day?”; “How much time will my bridesmaids and I need to get ready?” And while many of these questions have been consuming my thoughts during the wedding-planning process, I know that three months from now, all of it will be irrelevant as our wedding day will have come and gone and we will be starting a new chapter of our lives as husband and wife. This new chapter will have a whole different set of thoughts to keep our minds busy in the future.

As several of our friends and family members have gotten married before us and embark on the journey of marriage, they are now preparing to start families of their own. Watching friends and family members prepare to welcome their first children has made me start to think about what hopes I have for my future children. While every parent can agree that they want their children to be happy, healthy and always feel loved, there are additional hopes I have for my future children who will come from an interfaith marriage and be born into an interfaith family. These are the hopes I have for our future children:

I hope our future children know we chose love despite our different faith backgrounds. Jarrett was raised Jewish and I was brought up in the Catholic faith. We did not allow our different faiths to be a divider; rather, we used these differences to listen to what was important to one another and found compromises that worked for our relationship. I hope our backgrounds and experiences can teach our children to love and learn from others who are different from them.

Jarrett and I plan to raise our children Jewish, yet we still want to teach them that other religions exist and that not everyone has the same beliefs as them. I grew up in a town limited in diversity. Like me, my friends were raised Catholic and many of them even attended the same church as me and my family. I saw my friends at church on Sundays; we went to CCD classes together, received Communion and Confirmation together. It wasn’t until I went away to college that I met and became friends with individuals of different faith backgrounds.

Jarrett’s upbringing was similar in that all of his friends were raised Jewish and attended Temple and Hebrew school together. In the diverse world we live in today, I think it will be beneficial for our children to have exposure to and understanding of different religions. While I want our future children to embrace the religion we have chosen to raise them in, I also want them to understand other religions; especially Catholicism and the traditions that are important to me as someone raised Catholic.

I hope our future children feel confident in their religious identity despite coming from an interfaith family. In our ever-changing culture, interfaith families are becoming more and more common, but if my children are raised in a predominantly Jewish community, I hope my children will be able to educate their peers about their own interfaith family and never feel excluded because they come from an interfaith family. I hope they are proud of where they come from and who they are.

Finally, I hope our future children choose love like we have. Years and years from now when my future children meet the person who they want to share their life with, I want them to pick their life partner based on love. If our future children choose to marry, we will support them whether or not they choose interfaith marriage because we will support what makes them happy. Interfaith marriage is what we have chosen is right for our lives and I look forward to beginning that marriage in less than three months. As we continue the countdown to the beginning of our interfaith marriage, I also look forward to what the future holds when we decide to turn our interfaith marriage into an interfaith family.