“He can’t reconcile where we’d find the time, money and energy; I feel like we’d figure it out, like we did with the first”
Photo: Sam Edwards/Caiaimage/Getty Images The jealousy peaked when the second round of pregnancy announcements started to roll in. By then my daughter was 2 and I was 37, but neither my husband nor I had broached the subject of a second child. Instead, my tactics were cheap, comments lobbed at inopportune moments: I mentioned my age and boy names I liked, and reminded him that we had to “get it done” before we left Europe, our temporary home.
I’ve come to believe that there are two distinct groups of new parents: those for whom having a child causes ripples through the marriage — it triggers arguments and shuffles patterns and duties around, but the marital house remains sound — and those for whom a baby is like a bomb.
I’ve learned a lot about my husband in the three years our daughter has been around. He is a fiercely devoted dad, but parenting does not come naturally to him and he has limited stamina for it. Adding another baby to the mix — another mouth to feed and mind to educate, more toys, more spills, more crying in the night, more money flying out of our bank account — is more than he can take, and he acknowledges this willingly.
I never wanted just one child. I don’t know what I’d do without my older sister and I always — forgive me — secretly pitied single children. Weren’t they lonely? How did they stand up under the weight of their parents’ expectations, and then care for them alone in their old age? When I got pregnant with our daughter, my husband and I wanted to create something beautiful out of our bond — and we did. That decision is now anchored in an inescapable, three-dimensional reality. Although you never know exactly who you will end up with — and a new baby never loses its sense of wonderment and magic — after the first one, you at least have an idea of what life with children will look like: that it will be both heart-shatteringly joyful and, at times, its own circle of hell.
In either case, there’s something sad about this stalemate. It is profoundly different, of course, from the devastation caused by more complex, uncontrollable factors such as infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, or disabilities.
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