Before we get started: I am ever so very grateful for my two
beautiful, wonderful children. Okay? Pease don’t forget that and feel the need
to remind me about it because I AM.
Sometimes I’ll be driving along and I’ll start thinking that
maybe we actually could cope with another baby, and I’ll wonder if perhaps we
might even get a girl. I’ll start going over the dialogue in my head, how I
would present the idea to my husband and I’ll think about the possible reaction
I might get and how I would feel if he flat out rejected it. Then it hits me
with a sickening lurch that seems to knock me sideways; another baby isn’t an
option for us anymore. And it really doesn’t matter how many times I forget and
subsequently remember that fact, the force of the impact never seems to be any
less devastating. But we decided this. We looked at our options and we made
this choice. And, truthfully, there are a lot of reasons why it was the right
decision to make. Logical, sensible reasons with strong foundations in the
reality that is our life together. But there are a lot of reasons why it was
the totally fucking wrong decision too, and some days I find that I really
resent my husband for how easy he found the whole thing. I know that’s really
unreasonable. I’m self-aware enough to realise that. But here’s the thing about
me; sometimes I am really
unreasonable. And illogical too, a character trait for which this precise
situation is a case in point.
Here’s a list of the things that would have to change for my
husband and I to have another baby. It’s not a short list. In fact, it’s a list
that falls just short of EVERYTHING.
I would need a new car. Probably some hideous people carrier
effort with shitloads of seats and cavernous boot space for all the crap that I
would need to cart around all the time. A new car would be expensive, and I
just bought one that I really like and which suits our current family
perfectly. I don’t want a people carrier.
We would have to move house. About six weeks ago we had a
new bathroom fitted. It is a bathroom that I have been lusting after since ever
we bought this house and the bloody awful bathroom that came with it three
years ago. I like this house a lot, and there are a whole bunch of reasons why
I wouldn’t want to move out of it. It’s not all about the bathroom. But right
now, a lot of it is about the bathroom.
We would need more money, which means that I would need to
think about taking on some evening work as well as my day job. And it might
sound selfish, but I kind of value my quality of life over a hypothetical baby
right now considering how hard everything has been during Baby Taylor’s first
year and how sleep-deprived I still am. That’s just how it is right now, and
how it will probably be for some time to come.
Okay, so actually laid out like that, it’s not a long list.
But if you expand on the repercussions of just one of those things, the whole
concept kind of takes on supernova status and suddenly I WANT ANOTHER BABY
doesn’t really seem to hold much weight or make a whole lot of sense. Then
there’s all of the stuff that wouldn’t so much change as change back.
Night feeds. Show of hands for everyone who hates night
feeds as much as me? Yeah. Thought so. They’re shit, aren’t they? Particularly
when bad experiences with Baby Taylor’s night feeds would mean a constant inner
monologue of, “I wonder if s/he will actually go back to sleep when s/he is
done...” I can’t even tell you how much I am done with night feeds.
Alongside night feeds... Explosive nappies in the middle of
the night that get all over the bed and then the whole bed needs to be changed
as well as the baby and the baby has shit in his/her hair and I have no fucking
idea how it got there or what I’m supposed to do about it at 4AM and... NO.
JUST NO.
The What The Fuck Is Wrong With You And Why Won’t You
Sleep/Stop Crying/Eat guessing game. Because now Baby Taylor and I sort of
understand each other well enough that most of the time he can find a way to
tell me what he needs without screaming the house down about it and I usually
figure out what he’s getting at pretty quickly. When he was a baby? Nope. And
it was the same with Toddler Taylor, made even harder by the fact that he was
my first baby and I had no bloody idea what I was actually doing.
Immunisations every four weeks. Absolutely necessary, of
course. But “please don’t cuddle your baby until we’ve given both jabs”? Seriously...
Fuck off with that right now.
Weight Clinic. Does anybody else come out in a cold sweat of
panic every time they have to take a newish baby to weight clinic? Like, what
if s/he’s not gaining enough weight? What if they tell me I’m doing something
wrong? What if someone says FAILURE TO THRIVE? This has only become less of an
issue for me since I bought my own set of scales to alleviate the fear of nasty
surprises. I actually wish I was kidding about that, but HI. I’M NEUROTIC.
You know how people always tell you to “weigh up the pros
and cons” whenever you’re feeling a bit on-the-fence about something? That’s my
Could We Have Another New Baby cons list. Oh, and there’s one more: MY HUSBAND
HAD A VASECTOMY IN MARCH AND WE CAN’T HAVE BABIES TOGETHER ANYWAY. I always
somehow forget that one. It gets lost in the myriad of other cons, but then it
always seems to be the one that flies back up and smacks me in the face because
it’s the only one that really matters in the end. And a lot of the time I can
see this for what it really is, rather than what my conscious mind would like
me to believe it is. What I think this is actually about is how much I just did
not enjoy Baby Taylor’s first few months, how guilty I feel about wishing that
time away and how much I wish I could go back and find a way to not hate every
second of it. It’s about me wanting to “fix” myself, and I think I always knew
that I would feel that way. So my pros list would probably look something like
this:
I could exorcise my I’m A Shitty Mother demons by doing an absolutely
perfect job of nurturing and breastfeeding (I can’t even. It still kills me)
and bonding with my new baby, then I might start feeling better about myself
and stop obsessing over all of the things I regret that I can’t fucking change
because it’s too late.
But my selfish desire
to not feel totally shit about the whole experience forever is not a good
enough reason to bring another child into the world. Not at all. And it wouldn’t
actually work anyway. I was going to do a better job of a lot of things with
Baby Taylor than I did with Toddler Taylor and look how that turned out; I got
thrown a curveball and that whole notion went to hell. If we’re going to start
looking at it like that – and we shouldn’t, because I know it wasn’t my fault – the chances are it probably wouldn’t be
any better or easier next time either. So it’s really a good thing that we can’t
have more children, otherwise I might just end up forgetting all that and
convince myself that it would be a smart idea to try again.
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