Deciding to have a second baby

When you have one child, there’s a point before they start to befriend other children in public places where you frequently have to be the sibling. This was the case one hot summer’s day, playing in the water in the V&A’s John Madjeski Gardens. I tried to keep up a conversation with a friend and we took it in turns to hold my daughter’s hand and wade out with her; of course the discourse became fractured, moments lost that you simply had to let go.

My daughter stopped to watch two other girls, sisters. They were close in age and looked incredibly alike. They were so in love with each other that the existence of any other human was lost on them. They giggled and hugged and held hands and splashed. My child stared intently and tried to join in their game, but they weren’t interested. Their world was each other and anyone else was a rupture in the magic of it.

I was having trouble with sisters. Friends’ daughters and their connection to each other made my heart ache. I felt a grief at the idea that my daughter may not experience the kind of happy sister relationship I had. I was triggered by people I knew with two or three sisters, best friends growing up, still close in adulthood, now forming new webs as they had their own children and shared nieces and nephews. Even Disney films undid me: much to my shame the profound sisterly love between Ana and Elsa in Frozen left me wracked with sobs.

I remember one day we went to a National Trust property and I got absorbed in the family tree on the wall, in the seven children of the original owners of the house and all their children and their children and their children. The girls had pretty names: Vivienne, Constance, Sylvia, Margaret. I thought about the suffering of a body that births seven children: morning sickness, exhaustion, pelvic girdle pain, pelvic floor damage, mastitis, prolapse. We suffer then we just become a name on a piece of paper, a story, if we’re not forgotten entirely. I thought how easy and terrible it might be to not have to agonise over a choice.

Until my daughter was over two, when she never slept and I rarely slept, another baby felt out of the question. I was shaky with sleep deprivation and felt so far from myself that getting pregnant again felt like it would be akin to wiping myself out entirely. At times it felt like I was slowly digging myself out of a hole, and to have another baby would be taking a JCB to the foundation of my self-actualisation, saying goodbye to any chance to step out into the light for the next three or four years at least.

And then she slept, and I felt like me again, a feeling of total ecstasy, a redemption, a rounding of the circle. I had walked through a dark valley and it had all been worth it because here I was, stronger, battle-scarred, feeling more myself than ever. And here she was, an original, a force of nature, beautiful, lively, smart, perfect.

And letting go of this glorious healing lightness would have been - well, madness. This newfound space and time! Before I had a baby I imagined time to oneself as a parent was a nice to have - a trip to the spa, a meal out, a manicure. I didn’t imagine how sacred the act of making a cup of tea in a silent house would be. Of going for a walk alone. Of sitting in solitude slowly eating popcorn in the dark of the cinema. Once again, I had a semblance of a creative life, the force that made me feel like me more than anything. These things are not superficial but a form of recovery from the loss of self that we experience when we have children.

And also there was the flipside of the loss, the relationship that existed between the two of us. I knew every inch of her; the energy crackled between us as we lay like two jigsaw pieces, facing each other in the dark. The letting go of what we had - our daily lives together, uninterrupted, this bond, this intimacy, this unbroken agreement - felt impossible.

Yet there was a nagging and an aching, and I had no idea if it was a stirring in my heart or my womb or my conditioned self, a preference (or familiarity?) with more than three people in a family - was it a sense that sibling familes were essentially healthy and essential normal? Or was it an authentic feeling that there was room for one more?

When she was around four there was a window where it felt more possible, but I chose to give up my office job and pursue self-employment - financially it would be a silly time to give up my income by having a baby. And it was a nice excuse for me to not have to make this decision, not quite yet.

A little while before she was five, I felt the return of old fears about something terrible happening to her. I don’t know where they came from. It was pre-lockdown and nothing had happened to pre-empt them. But there was the same old terror, as its lifeblood the depth of my love for her, the love we are all semi-obliterated by, the way we are held perenially frozen in fear when we have a child.

At the same time I kept up my fascination with certain family set ups, like one that lived down the road - three children, all beautiful, similar versions of dark reddish hair and kind brown eyes. Their energy as they stood as a group, their likeness, their collective ease, was so alluring.

I was aware I was projecting how perfect things can look from the outside - I mean, I was struggling to countenance one more, let alone two more kids - and I was embarrassed to join the dots between the fear of losing my child and my longing - that there was something about bigger families that conjured safety, both physical and metaphysical.

When my baby was tiny someone said to my partner (really!) that one baby was a bad idea because if something happened to her or him, there would be no children left. I felt the insanity of this statement, that having more babies could somehow cancel out the grief of losing one, but still I tortured myself with the question: if I had one child who died, would I still be a mother? And I tortured myself with imaginings of a life that would “go back” to resembling the life of an older woman who had never had children: time and space and freedom but in this version, all undesired, all terrible. It would be too late to live out the daily life of a mother again. Another erasure.

These things - fear and stuckness and longing - were enough to persuade me to pay for weekly therapy, where I sobbed noisily and let streams of consciousness flow. I kept telling the therapist how frustrating it was to feel pulled so much towards having another child when I didn’t want one because my life was so great now. After a while the therapist pointed out how much I came back to this statement about not wanting another child, and I wept then, as it became clear: the lady doth protest too much.

For me saying yes, I do “want another baby” was and is a complex statement. It felt highly likely that it was the same as saying yes, I do want to be erased again, I do want to lose years of sleep again, I do want to put my marital relationship under strain, I do want to break a stable, happy home life for my daughter, I do want to lose access to a creative life again. We say yes despite and we say yes because I will get to create you, to meet and listen to and hold and be with you, a fact that boasts its grandness, its ability to obliterate all downsides.

My first experience of motherhood was a crash course in maternal ambivalence, how to experience deep love, growth and the greatest of struggles simultaneously, but in practice it’s very hard for us to continue to be comfortable with something both being one thing and another. The therapy reiterated my ability to hold opposites, once I’d recognised that that was what was necessary - that something can be two things at once, both dreadful and joyful. They can embody both combustion and creation, life and death, and we can, if we like, make the choice to say yes to all of it.

I knew already that there was no “right” answer, and that our lives would be ok if we remained a one-child family, and our lives would be ok if we didn’t. The same friend who sat with me in the John Madjeski Gardens said, there is no bad decision. That is, every choice you make will involve some loss. I knew it, but I wanted an end from the constant, uncomfortable indecision, the crippling fear of regretting not jumping in. Now I wonder if this process of making a decision can be rushed or if we must simply live through it, until something wins out.

Why do we want what we want? There is the biology that informs it (that many but not all of us are susceptible to), the primal, evolutionarily-generated desire to grow and hold a baby. There is social conditioning, and there is the memory of safety and familiarity, if we have it, which might explain the feeling that for me, four was the number, a destination to reach, a homecoming.

And also there are the lessons that we need to learn (sorry, babies, sometimes we have you because there are lessons we need to learn). I needed to be able to trust myself, to discard pros and cons and trust a feeling that felt true. I needed to trust rolling the dice, to take a risk in order to fulfil a desire. I was weary of simply continuing to live in a way that was easy but that also failed to face something fundamental inside me. I was tired of arguing with that thing, too, of trying to rationally outwit it. It just wanted to come out, to be allowed space to live.

Before I could choose I also needed to heal some of the small-t trauma that I experienced in the postpartum period. I see some women who carry this and I wish healing for them from this, not necessarily because having another baby must be something they really want deep down, but because trauma doesn’t only pain us but sometimes paralyses us.

I don’t think there are many truly good or bad reasons to have a baby that you can’t meet with its reasonable opposite, and when you’ve exhausted yourself analysing the pros and cons, the rational weightings of each, what is left is just what’s in your heart.

I wonder if it the rationale for our desires even matters, once you’ve ascertained that what is being told to you is not fleeting, is not based on fear, is true to you. I know people who have felt a truth, a desire to procreate but decided not to have children because of the climate crisis. This is their sacrifice, as it is a mother’s sacrifice to give of herself and have children. It’s up to us to choose what we sacrifice.

I read somewhere a theory that we only truly regret the things we went against our intuition about: even if the decision turns out badly, at least we knew we were following our gut - inexplicable, perhaps better and higher than something can be teased out and rationally explained or weighed up.

It is ok for some things to be inexpressible.

Right now, I am twenty two weeks pregnant; I am having a boy but beyond this I know nothing, as we always know nothing: what he will be like as a baby, toddler, child, adult; how much (little) sleep I will get, how much or litttle I will fall apart, how him and his sister will bond early on and later, how my relationship will fare, how our family will reshape, where we will live, what our challenges will be. We can make educated guesses but we are fundamentally in the dark.

I feel at peace though, not with regrets, though I know there will be moments when they will come and feel true. Hearing what’s most true for you - as changeble, ambivalent and complex as it is - is something I wish for everyone who struggles with a difficult decision. Life can feel like a labrinth but at least you are there with yourself. You are not your enemy. You have fears and feelings and hopes, a shifting mass of sand and jewels to sift through. I hope dearly you get to know and love them.

Chloe GeorgeSeptember 20, 2020pregnancy