Mama Writes: Second Thoughts, When's The Right Time to Have Another Baby?

I was pushing my two year old up Prospect Place toward the  the other day when he turned around in his stroller to have a clear look at me, then asked, "Mama, when you gonna give me my twins?"

"Twins?!" I balked, choking on his leftover Bergen Bagel. "Why do you want twins?!"

"Well," he said thoughtfully—he'd really pondered this—"I want a baby—no, two babies—because then I can be a big sister."

I decided not to point out that if all went according to plan, he would never be anyone's big sister (just as I have not let on that he's probably not going to use his nipples to feed someone someday). I didn't shriek, "I'm thirty-five! I've still got time!", or mention, in a discouraging tone, that imagining having a baby around is much different than actually having one (let alone two).

Instead I said, "I'm not ready to have another baby. Or two babies, for that matter."

To which he replied, "I am. I want some babies in our house."

I guess I shouldn't have been so shocked; a new baby in the house is very much in his zeitgeist. Of the fourteen families who've attended the music class we've held in our Prospect Heights living room for the past year (all of whom have a child my son's age), ten have welcomed a new addition since November. That's 71%.

....

The first few months of motherhood felt, to me, like the best parts of high school. I was lucky, along with the moms mentioned above, to end up in a mothers' group 100+ strong, composed mainly of Park Slope and Prospect Heights women who all had their babies during the same icy winter month. We spent the spring of 2009 ordering in Hanco's and  as we nursed and snuggled our firstborns on each other's couches—Tuesday on 19th Street, Wednesday on Atlantic and Fourth—a wandering (sleep-deprived, terrified) tribe. And although we were now mothers—which, by its very definition made us adults—the conversation couldn't have been more intimately adolescent, as we dealt with our changing bodies, waited for our periods, got the skinny from the few who'd "done it." "Did it hurt?" we asked each other. "Can you teach me how to nurse side-lying?" I loved the camaraderie, the sense that we were all in something huge together.

Now, two years later, I admire my mommy friends' fortitude and grace at deciding to reenter this life of midnight feedings, while still vaulting headlong at a toddler's pace into the world of potty-training and teaching someone how to share. I cheer at each birth announcement, and hungrily hold their infants at Long Meadow picnics (oh! the whir of tiny hearts! the sweet flutter of newborn eyelids!), but what I told my son is true. I am not ready to have another baby.

And yet it's hard to imagine being left behind. Although I suppose there is nothing more adolescent than being tempted by what your friends are doing, it is hard, sometimes, to separate my own feelings of resolve from the temptation of being a part of something again. I would never have a baby because of the 71%, but I find their sway enticing.

"Why now?" I asked two of these moms a few months ago during a precious night out at . Our friendship has transcended being fellow parents, and I am lucky to count them as among my closest friends, close enough to reveal my personal ambivalence at having a second right now. "Our firstborns are still practically babies. Why not wait a little longer?" I asked.

Their answers made sense: many local moms are older and want to assure a sibling for their firstborns; those who work full-time would rather pay a nanny for fewer years of combined childcare; some believe that two years is the perfect age difference; some want more than two kids; some just want to put the challenging years of babyhood behind them.

"But doesn't anyone remember how hard it was?" I asked, my voice taking a panicked tone as I gulped my Brooklynite. "Isn't anyone afraid to lose themselves again? Their minds, their bodies, their sleep?"

My friend calmly smiled and put her hand on mine. "When you're ready, you'll want it more than you don't."

....

Her words played over in my head as I watched my son effortlessly climb the stairs on the big-kid side of the Underhill Playground, then wait his turn at the top of the twisty slide before hurtling, gleefully, down to the ground. He made instant friends with a boy a little younger than himself, and together they traversed the sprinklers, my son holding the other boy's hand the whole time. As I watched him ask someone if he could have a turn, please, then nimbly, consciously, skirt the spray of water, I had a flurry of understanding: while he will always be my baby, he is (most days) a baby no more.

Still, I have plenty of good reasons to wait before conceiving a second. To be happy in myself, I must write, and to write, I must have room in my brain, away from diapers and feedings and even, yes, love. And while I understand that some folks want kids close in age, I live faithfully in the knowledge that although my sister and I are seven years apart, we are the best of friends. My freelancing husband and I fret about money all the time, we want to travel, we want to have time and space to know and love each other even as we know and love our son.

But there is not a question in my mind that my son, my kid—because that's what he is now—will make someone a wonderful brother, or sister, someday. Just as there is no question that I want to be a mother again, to help, and witness, someone go from whirring heartbeat and fluttering eyelid to running, dancing, wonder.

Just not, hopefully, to twins.