On Having More Kids

Baby showers, a nursery glider, and the weird paradox I live in now.

I sat at a baby shower recently for two friends having their second babies. I felt off coming into it, and I couldn't put my finger on why. I curled my hair, but I hated it. I changed my outfit 12 times, still hated it. I ended up wearing black and grey, while everyone else showed up in bright colors (the theme was fruit, whoops). I was uncomfortable the whole evening, and I couldn't turn it off.

Baby showers are always tricky when your birth story feels so different than the rest. I thought maybe I was just out of practice.

Then it hit me. DUH. The second pregnancy comparisons, the birth stories with doting fathers, the extra gifts for anxious big brothers and jealous big sisters.

I didn't get to experience that type of family dynamic as a mother: the second child. I used to sit through baby showers with a hopeful anticipation that I might get to have another pregnancy and birth experience that feels more normal, more like the women who surrounded me. Maybe someday I'd even get my own baby shower that wasn't riddled with grief.

But this shower hit different, because I knew I wouldn't this time. There was no hopeful anticipation to keep me smiling. My one messy, complicated, bittersweet child-rearing story is the only one I'll have.

I made up an excuse to leave early. I've learned to just remove myself from those situations when the grief feels too heavy. It's not you, it's me.

Over the last couple years, I've moved more on the spectrum towards not wanting to have any more kids. As I've inched closer to that final decision, it's been surprising what moments set off sadness and which ones I gloss right over.

When I was pregnant, I bought the gray glider that sat in the corner of Poppy's nursery. I put it together by myself, navigating around a growing belly, a new reality. Five years later, I listed it on Facebook Marketplace for 100 bucks. No stains, no tears, great condition, I wrote. Just filled with bittersweet memories that only I will ever be able to recall. Rocking her to sleep, nursing her for hours, falling asleep and waking up and thank God you didn’t drop her, and how long was I asleep? Watching her dad rock her in this chair on his brief, weekly visitations. I offered more, but he didn't know what to do with a newborn.

I was fine during the whole process — didn’t even flinch when someone commented that they wanted to buy it. But then I watched as two men carried it off my porch, placed it into the bed of a pickup truck, and drove it away to the next baby. I closed my front door and steadied myself against it. Closed it on a phase of parenting that I didn't think would end this way. But what's new. Nothing was happening how I thought it would.

I cried for only a minute, hoping I would get to buy another chair to rock another baby someday. Maybe it was easier because of the hope. If I knew then that I wouldn't be having any more children, maybe it would have been unbearable to let a silly, grey nursery glider go.

After their first baby, most moms hang on to these things — the rocking chairs, the crib, the clothes — for their next baby, and maybe even another after that. I started to do that when she began growing out of the tiny onesies and the little activity seats. I held onto the baby things as long as I could, thinking that if I met someone next month or next year, maybe I could reuse these items in due time. But the months came and went. They turned into years and now almost an entire decade.

I loaned the crib to a friend when she was pregnant with her second, her first baby still in a crib herself. I'll have it back in time to use it again myself, I thought. But then I got it back, and another friend was expecting, and I wasn't even dating, so I passed it along again. That time, I knew it wouldn't be coming back.

I don't remember when I decided to stop keeping the baby things, but the more I let go, the easier it became. My heart didn't have room for that kind of daydreaming, and neither did my basement.

When I drove to Indianapolis to visit an old friend, I left my car seat there for her to use for her second, due in just a few months. I didn't think much of it.

When Poppy was finally way too tall to be climbing in and out of the stroller, I gave it a good cleaning and dropped it off at a consignment shop. I rolled it in, parked it next to the others, and looked at it for a second remembering the tiny pigtails that used to sit there. I smiled and left.

And I very, very easily dropped off the booster seat on another friend's porch just a couple weeks ago. It was simply a task in the middle of a long list of errands. Poppy was with me as we unloaded it from the car and waved goodbye to her toddlerhood. We probably made some joke about it, I exaggerated a fake cry to make her laugh, we jumped back in the car, and we were off to our next stop.

As if closing the door on the decision to bring more human beings into this world is as fleeting as returning library books or a Target pickup order.

It's a weird paradox to hold these two things at once now:

1. I wish I could have a baby and raise a child with a loving, present partner.

2. I don't want to have another baby or raise another child at this stage in my life.

That story that I thought might be coming — the one where I remarry quickly after divorce and have more kids — it just never came. I've come to terms with it, despite the occasional trigger at a baby shower, or the reminder that I don’t get to make a baby with the person I love now, or even that crazy feeling when your boobs remember things as you see a new mom nursing. (Our bodies are wild.)

But the story that is coming — the one that's already been happening — is pretty great too. Straight up blissful, even. I don't have any more baby gear collecting dust in my basement, waiting for the next one to rock, stroll, buckle in, or carry.

There isn't a next one.

Because there is this one: an almost 10-year-old kid who makes me laugh daily, asks hard questions, and is learning to be brave and kind and patient and curious. She knows how to express how she's feeling, good or bad. She knows how to apologize. She owns her weird. She knows how to connect with others, even adults. She probably knows me better than anyone. How lucky that I get to be her mom? And that she gets to have her mom all to herself.

I don't actually need a next one, if I can always have her.

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