To Three or Not to Three?

I can't handle the children I have. Why do I want more??

As I wrote about in this post comparing my brain to a bachelorette party at a Dave & Buster’s, I like things extra. When I make a recipe, I double it. When I have a party, I invite a hundred people. When I bump my jams in the Subaru, I turn it up so loud that the next person who starts the car jumps in their seat when the radio goes on.

I grew up in a big family. There were five of us, six if you counted my cousin who lived upstairs, seven or eight if you added the children of visiting professors who lived next door, nine or ten or eleven if you included the wayward friends from smaller or more fragmented families who cycled through our home like foster children all throughout my childhood.

My siblings are a deep bench. It’s not just that I have a sibling for all seasons (two attended my births, one is my financial advisor, one sends me hard-to-find clips of misanthropic stand-ups), but that I have multiple ride-or-die bitches to rely on whenever I need them. Four people to accompany me on travel adventures, four people to help me parse the ways of our parents and upbringing, four people to call when I’m hopeless or terrified or when I’ve accidentally murdered someone and need unconditional support and logistical guidance (I don’t know why, but I imagine this scenario often).

Please enjoy this amazing John Mulaney bit, brought to you by my little brother.

When I was pregnant with my second kid, I asked my mom how she had ever loved so many children. Didn’t she really and truly, she could be honest here, love her first child the most? She rejected this emphatically, explaining that she had been amazed, but not surprised, by the fact that she always had an equal and generous well of love for each of her children. She never once regretted having a number of children that most of her friends, and many strangers in the Popeyes that was our only regular all-family dining destination insisted was at best pitiable, and at worst, insane.

When we found out that our second child was going to be a girl, another man remarked to my husband “One of each! Now you can ‘snip snip!’” (universally agreed-upon sound effect for a vasectomy). People are as comforted by a two-child family as they are by an episode of the British Baking Show where the judges decide not to send anyone home, especially when one child is born with a penis and the other is born with a vagina. A year after achieving this summit of parenting, I almost passed out while having Nexplanon, the two-inch, five-year, birth-control-rod, inserted into my left bicep. Anyone that tells you it doesn’t hurt is lying. Everything about having babies, and not having babies, hurts.

This is the couple featured in an article about vasectomy reversals. I don’t know if they’re wearing masks because this is very current or because even talking about reversing your vasectomy is very dangerous.

But, as I remember someone in the movie Doubt saying passionately, I have doubts. I loved being pregnant - the purpose of it, the productivity, the shiny hair. I always imagined myself building a family modeled after the one I’d grown up in: kids everywhere, arranging themselves into all kinds of permutations as they grew and developed, building an identity padded by a thick layer of immutable alliances. Now, as father time (I do believe that time is a man) nudges me towards 40 and my body suffers ailments that my doctor kindly tells me are not likely to go away, I’m afraid that the vision of a large family that I’d cultivated for so long is growing fainter by the day.

And it’s not just my body that feels daunted. My first child was a reckoning. I was not prepared for the jarring gap between loving and caring for other people’s children for so many years and actually having one of my own. But my second child was a bludgeoning; like being kicked when you are already down. Whatever purchase I had made since becoming a mother, whatever small steps I’d taken towards becoming a differentiated person again, disappeared. I was not just back where I started, but deeper in the hole than I could have ever imagined - overwhelmed, outmatched, and afraid that I had done both of my children a great, irreparable harm by my hubris, by thinking that I had enough love to go around. The hole has probably been dug even deeper by the “unexpected events” of the last 12 months, but I have a feeling that the difference between having two young children and having two young children in a pandemic is not actually that great.

This intensity, my anecdotal research tells me, is likely to shift as my children get older (my son is five and my daughter is, in her words, “mostly two”). They will need me less. They will develop more problem-solving strategies than “scream at the top of your lungs for a very, very, long time.” In this highly interesting article in the Atlantic, Bryan Caplan, an economist and father of four says that “when people think about having children, they tend to dwell on the early years of parenting—the stress and the sleep deprivation—but undervalue what family life will be like when their children are, say, 25 or 50.” Should I be having children for my present self, who can barely manage to take a daily multivitamin, or for a future, imagined self who is somehow better-resourced and perhaps even lonely? Once things get easier, wont it be even harder to convince myself to break out the belly band and papaya enzymes and find the shoes that fit my one, enormous, pregnancy foot?? As my sister-in-law (another perk of having many siblings - dope in-laws) once advised me, “when you have two kids who you drop off at the same free school every day, you are never going back.” And is there something troubling in the idea that the first thing I’d want to do after my children gained some independence is create another dependent?

Golden Globe nominee Kate Hudson has 100 kids, all named Blaze, and will be a very happy old lady surrounded by grandchildren.

There is an idea in the literature on what is called “sibship size” (yup, real scientific term) that having more children leads to “resource dilution.” Less money, attention, time, energy for picking all of the “spicy parts” out of a not-at-all spicy dish, to go around. A law of diminishing parenting returns. Some argue that this idea is too simple; siblings bring great benefits too. One study found that each additional sibling leads to a 3% decrease in your likelihood of divorce as an adult. This is the kind of finding that my PhD advisor would have pointed out is statistically, but not practically, significant.

And then there is another very plausible idea put forth by Caplan, that modern parents could have (and could enjoy having) more children if we didn’t make parenting so “unnecessarily dreadful” by spending way too much time and money on our children. Sure, I would have liked to have had a tad bit more helicoptering as a child (I can recall multiple insect infestations in our bedrooms that went unnoticed for quite a while - sorry mom and dad but I have four eye witnesses). But, the culture of parenting today makes each child feel like such an incredible additional burden because, as Snoop says, we are doin’ too much.

I feel compelled to assure you that my children are delights. They have rallied me to the cause of being a less shitty person and trying to live in a less shitty world. You know all this, but not saying it makes me anxious about seeming like a terrible mother (thank you, culture of parenting!), and of course not saying it is not saying the whole truth.

Perhaps I will make more of these little delights, though I do worry about the dilution of resources for myself and my marriage, which I don’t take for granted even though I am 12% less likely to get divorced than an only child. Maybe I wont, and instead I’ll focus on what I want to be doing right now for the family I actually have; which parts of our lives might benefit from a bit of dilution. Maybe I’ll fill our home with cousins and wayward friends and next door neighbors and even real foster children. Maybe I’ll let my “no-baby-rod” run its five-year course and then leave it in my arm as a slightly uncomfortable reminder of how I chose this, and also because I am legit horrified at the idea of having it taken out :)

Reader update: Last week I wrote about our bathroom door no longer closing, but then I went out of town BY MYSELF for a night and took this picture from inside the hotel bathroom for you all. Aaaaaaaaaaaah. There is hope for us all.