Two Kids Are Twice As Many Kids As One Kid

Is this a huge mistake? Too late if so!

Adrienne-Elodie-Clemence Ball-Demont (1886-1935), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

We had a lot of board games when I was a kid. Many of them involved advancing along a path with the knowledge that somewhere, embedded in the deck of Chance cards, on the spinner, or on the game board, was catastrophe– a roll that would send your game piece careening down a Chute that would set you down back at the beginning, a stint in Gloppy’s molasses swamp, a move that would Wake The Dragon and cause your penguin to drop its egg (did I hallucinate Don’t Wake the Dragon or was that a real game?)

As a nervous perfectionist, I preferred games where you couldn’t get points taken away after you’d already earned them– games like Trivial Pursuit for kids and Balderdash. 

Now, I feel like I’m almost to the end of a Chutes and Ladders game that took more than two years to play and I’m willingly– eagerly, even, sometimes– about to plunge back down the long slide to the beginning. 

I’m about 20 weeks pregnant with my second child. I’m about halfway through what will probably be my last pregnancy– because I don’t want more than two kids, and even if I did, I turned 40 last summer which means that my reproductive system is, medically speaking, a steampunk Rube Goldberg machine shooting puffs of dust every time it ovulates. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, Life Found A Way, and there’s now a papaya-sized fetus kicking me in the cervix, along with the toddler-sized toddler constantly asking me to pick her up. It’s 9 pm. Her bedtime is at 8. Chaos reigns inside and outside of my body. 

Every single day I have a moment or two when I pause and think, wait a minute, am I making a huge mistake?

I didn’t feel like this with the first one, although perhaps it would have been healthier and more honest if I had. I went through that pregnancy with a sense of wonder and dread, scared of things that turned out to be nothing and blithely unaware of things that turned out to be a much bigger deal than I’d bargained for– pregnancy was easier on my body than I worried it would be and harder on my relationship than I believed it could be. Last time, I was nervous because I didn’t know what to expect. This time, I’m nervous because I do know what to expect, and it ain’t fun. 

Babies are cute and they smell divine, but they are also kind of the worst, especially if you’re their mother (or secondary caregiver… but mostly their mother). Yeah, babies are beautiful to look at, but is it fun to be a milk bag? Is it fun to go through the hormonal shift equivalent of a super puberty in a matter of days after giving birth? Is it just the best to be grasped and grabbed and relied on as another completely nonverbal organism’s primary source of comfort? Is it fun to never relax, ever, but also rarely have time to exercise and also rarely sleep for months? No. It is not. Being the mother to a baby is important. It is special. It is powerful. But it is not fun. 

Anybody who says babies are fun has either never had a baby, had an easy baby, or is rich enough to afford a household staff, and so help me people who did not have an easy time during the newborn phase do not need to hear it from people who did. An average-to-difficult baby is relentless. Their cries follow you around like a furious ghost. You are haunted by the stupid hope of your soft focus Demeter-ass expectations you had during pregnancy when you didn’t know any better, the days when you wished more than anything that the baby would come early at 37 weeks. “I have a feeling this one will come early!” I told people hopefully, not understanding how much easier it is to haul a baby around when they’re physically part of your body than it is to spend ten minutes making sure you have everything you need in your diaper bag every time you leave the goddamn house. 

Toddlers are better than babies by a degree of magnitude. The newborn phase I can take or leave. It’s a means to an end.

I’ve looked to other parents of two small children for reassurance that this getting through the newborn phase again is not going to turn my husband and I into hollow shells of our former selves. The feedback I’ve gotten is not promising. One friend told us that having two kids was not twice as much work as having one kid, it was “a million times” as much work. Okay. Another tried to reassure me by saying it’s only hard for a few years. A few years! I’ll be 1,000 years old in a few years!

At least I feel physically well enough to forget I’m pregnant sometimes. I didn’t have morning sickness when I was carrying Juniper and I didn’t have it with this one. But then what happens at the end of this hits me after I do something like try to lie on my stomach or put on regular pants. Oh my god, in less than five months I have to give birth what the hell.

I have started to feel this little one kicking and rolling, like my guts are an uncomfortable pillow they’re trying to pound into shape. After Juniper was born I missed the feeling of her kicks. Now, when I feel the baby, a bolt of anxiety shoots through me. It’s the same flavor of sudden anxiety I feel in that dream I still have where I’m in college and I have a final the next day but I haven’t been to class all semester: Oh God. I have to do this again!

We wanted this, though. Right? We wanted Juniper to have a sibling. I love my brother and sister dearly, and my relationships with them through childhood and adulthood are among the most cherished and special in my life. (My younger sister just so happens to be pregnant now, too, and we are due about a week apart, which is fun.)

The second reason I wanted Juniper to have a sibling is because I didn’t want her to be an only child. It’s not that only children are necessarily bad– just that I can usually tell when somebody grew up without a sibling constantly humbling them in an age-appropriate manner. Plus, Juniper has half my DNA and half my husband’s, and picturing either of us as only children makes me shudder. We’d be absolute monsters, unrelenting black holes for our parents’ attention, lonely, disregulated, spoiled with nobody to draw our focus. Again, that’s not all only children– just some of them, and probably me if I had been an only child. 

My daughter is showing signs of being a great big sister. Every kid has their strengths and weaknesses, and I don’t want to be one of those parents declaring that their child is gifted and exceptional. But! Juniper is exceptionally kind to other kids. I’ve never seen her push, hit, or take anything from another kid. She shares food, she shares toys. I’ve never seen or heard of her behaving aggressively toward anybody except me or her dad when we’re trying to get her to do something she doesn’t want to do, like get out of the bath or not throw her galoshes into the toilet. She’s kind to our very old cat and medium old dog, and has a special little voice she uses to talk to both of them. She’s nice to babies. She’s gentle with her stuffed animals. I can’t wait to introduce her to her little sister, and see them grow up together. 

But also: It seems like it took so long to get to where we are with one kid. We’re just moving into a phase where she understands the concept of waiting, of helping, of noticing how other people are feeling. And we’re going back to the hard part. To make matters worse, this one’s going to be a Gemini. I will be mother to a Scorpio and a Gemini. Something tells me that things do not turn out well for my character at the end of this comic book. 

But also: We’ll get through the newborn phase. Maybe this time we’ll be less terrified. Maybe I’ll be able to slow down and appreciate it rather than just trying to survive. 

But also: I can’t wait to dress the little one in Juniper’s old clothes and watch Juniper tell the little one stories. I feel so lucky. 

But also: Fuck.