I have been going back through some of my old writing from last fall, and wanted to share this piece. Clearly, we have since decided to have another child. Moving from where we were when I wrote this to where we are today is a different story for another time, but I wanted to publish this to remind myself where we were and what it looked like for us to wrestle with opposing viewpoints in our marriage.
At
just shy of fourteen months, my son mastered walking. After weeks of taking hesitant steps before returning to the
more familiar motion of crawling, he now happily toddles across the room. He is unabashedly proud of this newest
accomplishment, and often throws a sneaky grin over his shoulder when he
reaches his destination. When he
is feeling less modest, he enthusiastically claps. In moments like those, it is
hard to imagine not adding another child to our family.
If
you had asked me a decade ago how many children I wanted to have, I would have confidently
answered three or four. Two seemed
too few, more than four seemed unwieldy.
If you had posed the same question on the eve of my wedding, I would
have responded two or three and my soon-to-be husband would have said one or
two. I figured we would end up compromising
with the overlap--two. But children
are not something you compromise on and today—more than a year into parenting
our son—we would both answer maybe just the one.
It
was responsible and productive to talk about having children before we got
married, but it was a purely speculative exercise. We tried our best to imagine what it would be like and how
we would feel, but thinking about it and living it are different beasts. After wrestling with the reality of the
latter, it was clear we needed to integrate our past ideas with our present
lives to create a workable vision for the future.
At
first, this integration looked more like manipulation as I struggled to let go
of my desire for a larger family. I
knew that my husband was leaning toward only having one child, but I naively
thought I could change his mind. Sure, you only want one child, but I really want two, so that’s what will happen. I did not say that out loud, because
even at the time I could hear how selfish it sounded. Children
require a lot of time, attention, and sacrifice from their caregivers. They bring joy into our lives, but they
also bring stress. Despite what
well-meaning strangers on the street would have us believe, the joy does not
take away the stress; you have to make room for both in your life. Our son brings love and happiness to
our home that would not be present without him, but acknowledging that fact does
not lessen the sleep deprivation, accompanying irritability, or feeling of
being spread too thin.
After
months of going back and forth, we reached a stale mate. I wanted another child; he did
not. When I got desperate to bring
him around to my side, I resorted to the regret card. You know the one--the I just don’t want to look back on my life forty years from now and wish
that we had had another, and the I
can see myself regretting not having a child, but not the reverse.
Oy.
If
I was asking him to seriously consider the idea of having another child, then I
needed to seriously consider the idea of stopping with one.
So
I did. I set aside my preconceived
notion that a family of three would be incomplete and sat with the idea of our
son being an only child. In that
process I realized that holding on too tightly to a decade-old idea of what I
thought our family should be was preventing me from enjoying what our family is.
Ironically,
one of the things that convinced me I could be happy stopping with one was the very
regret argument I tried to use on my husband, only now I worry that we might
regret having a second child, not the reverse.
I
do not worry that we would not love that child; there is always more love to
give. I do not worry that we would
be unable to adjust to new routines and schedules; our parenting journey so far
has been nothing if not a crash course in flexibility. I do not worry that we would resent the
child; we are capable of dealing with our emotions in a way that would not
transfer them onto our son or daughter.
But
I do worry about the impact a second child would have on our family
system. My first obligation is to
our marriage and I fear that another child would ask more of it than I am prepared
to. Yes, it is a sacrifice to put
aside my desire for a larger family.
But it would be more of a sacrifice to put our family in a position
where the balance between stress and joy tipped in the wrong direction. If having another child means stretching
us further than we are capable, then I want to stop with one. Could our marriage survive having
another child? Yes--I have no
doubt. But merely surviving feels
like an awfully low bar to set.
If
circumstances in our life were different, this conversation might have had
another outcome. But part of
living in the adult world is making decisions based on the cards we are
holding, not the ones we hoped to draw.
Intellectually,
I came the conclusion that stopping with one child might be the smartest course
for our family. But it took longer
for my emotions to catch up to my brain. I needed time to mourn the future we may never have and acknowledge what
I was losing.
I may
never be pregnant and get to feel a child growing and moving inside of me. I may never hold a sleepy newborn of my
own as she drifts in and out of sleep. I may never see another child learn to crawl, walk, talk, read, or
dance. I may never witness a second child’s first day of school, graduation,
wedding day, and the thousand moments before, after, and in between that make a
life.
And
that’s okay.
I am
doing my best to embrace the journey as it unfolds with my son. Even if we have another child, all of
those experiences would eventually be in the past. Time moves forward, children grow up, and all of the
milestones and sweet moments become memories, no matter how many children we
have.
The
longer I sit with the idea of being a family of three, the less it feels like a
sacrifice and the more it feels like it could be right choice for us. When I
told my husband that I was comfortable with the idea of our son being our only
child, he was the one unwilling to permanently close that door.
Before
these recent conversations, I always strongly and passionately argued for
having another child—and soon! My enthusiasm made him feel the need to
stand more firmly on the side of stopping with one lest he become swept away by
my relentless attempts to persuade.
Once
I stopped approaching these discussions with an obvious motive, we could both admit our doubts—his about our son being
an only child, and mine about adding to our family. The tables had turned. Now he was the one convincing me not to abandon on the possibility of another child.
We
have tentatively decided to remain a family of three. It is not the final word for either of us; it is more of a
natural default position while we decide the best path forward for our
family. I still feel the pull to
have another child and find myself daydreaming about how our family would look
with two children instead of one. He still has reservations about expanding beyond our current size, both logistical and philosophical. But neither of us is willing to convince
the other while we have lingering doubts about our respective positions.
I
have come to accept that it is a leap of faith either way. If we decide not to have any more
children, we have to let go of all of the possibilities another child would
bring. If we have another child,
we have to let go of our anxiety about how we would juggle the competing needs
of a new child, our son, our marriage, and ourselves.
Decades
from now, I am confident we will not regret our choice—whatever it may be—because
neither choice will leave with some less-than version of an otherwise ideal
family; it
will leave us with our family.
