I was what you might call a reluctant mom. In the Bay Area, it’s not remotely unusual to wait until your mid-30s to begin a family. Frankly, it’s often the norm. Between schooling, starting a career, a few years enjoying yourself in the big city, the time swiftly moves by. To be perfectly honest, I was quite certain that motherhood was never in my future.

After a few years of marriage, when I was 34 and Sandy was 30, we found ourselves birth-control-compromised and jokingly ‘put it to fate’, because I was fully confident that I was infertile and we were a couple meant for four legged children only. Naturally, I was pregnant immediately. Nine months and 65 pounds later, Eliot was born. Thirteen sleepless months later, we acquired, tried and discarded every imaginable baby toy, device and sleep solution in an attempt to sooth our colicky son. Needless to say there was never any consideration of a second child. By the time Eliot was two, I had already started acquiring story books for him on the benefits of being an only child. We were not alone in this. Several of our friends were likely to have only one child, in some cases as an active choice and in others as a by-product of their situation. We were confident enough to give away any remaining baby items that we’d tucked away.

I really cannot point to a moment when this determination changed. I think Sandy was the first one to express an active desire to consider a second child, but that could just be wishful thinking. It could have been me. I do know that I battled with the idea over months. Some part of me would lay out all the reasons not to have a second. The arguments were sound: money, time, scheduling, sleep, sanity, comfort, traveling, and so forth. The original counter argument was fairly weak and easy to override: Eliot would be better off with a sibling. Of course, around then many of Eliot’s cousins and classmates were started to acquiring their younger siblings. The guilt grew a little stronger. Then Eliot started asking for a baby because his friends were all getting babies. *sigh* For me, the internal deliberation continued. I wrestled with it, I picked at it, I worried at it, I rolled it around in my head, I chewed on it. You name the metaphor, I did it.

I think it is in this arena that I envy Sandy the most. He’s so binary about these sorts of things. This is not to say that he didn’t have his own considerations, but I think for the most part he just didn’t think about it. If it couldn’t be solved at this moment, it wasn’t worth worrying about. Just after Eliot’s third birthday (August 2008), I finally teetered over to the side of having another child. Sandy said sure, four years apart is a great distance between sibs, and the trying began.

Predictably, we found ourselves pregnant a couple of weeks later (September 2008). That was certainly an ‘oh hell’ moment for me. All my resolve went out the window. Did we really want to have a second child? We’d gotten rid of ALL of the baby stuff… including the crib… what were we thinking doing this again? How was I (who hasn’t driven a car in almost 15 years and has no intention of starting again now) going to get around on a bike with a 3 year old while I was 8 months pregnant? Nevermind that… how I was going to bike around with a newborn and a 4 year old? Where were we going to put it? We’ve a reasonably sized house, but it still just has the two bedrooms upstairs. How were we going to pay for preschool and daycare simultaneously? The questions ricocheted around my brain. At the point of bursting, I shared with two close friends: Anne, who was trying for a second and Jeanne, who had no intention of having more than one. I confess, I was embarrassed to tell each of them we were pregnant. I, who had spoken so vociferously about the horrors of early childhood, who had planted a flag in the soil for the benefits of having an only child, meekly explained that I had caved to my hormonal other half. Being the truly solid friends that they are, though surprised, neither disparaged me nor poked fun at my broken resolve. Looking back, I still marvel at their grace. Jeanne, must have felt some sense of loss. We’d bonded on the notion of raising our onlies together as pseudo-siblings. And Anne had already had one miscarriage and numerous failed attempts in her try for a second child, but she showed nothing but joy for me and our easy, unexpected pregnancy. You can’t ask for better friends than that. Happily for Anne, a few weeks later she was pregnant with her second, Oliver, born mid July 2009.

As you must suspect, since I have not reported our own second child, we miscarried ‘naturally’ at about 8 weeks. This is not a post about miscarrying, so I will not belabor this, but I have to say that ‘naturally’ implies simple, accidental, happenstance and so many things that it was not. It was an endless week, a prolonged process of cramps and pains. By the end of the week I was jumping up and down, bouncing on a ball, and anything else I could do to agitate the lifeless thing out of me. By the end, I was a mobile illustration of conflicted. I’d spent the weeks of pregnancy questioning whether I truly wanted to have another and left myself little room to mourn it not coming to fruition. I’d only shared the pregnancy with my closest friends so only they and one or two coworkers and advisers (who we told because of the time off of work/school) knew about the miscarriage. No one else had a clue. We continued to socialize with friends, family, coworkers, classmates and clients as if nothing had happened. The weeks following were surreal. It’s not surprising to me that in the haze that followed we found ourselves pregnant a little over a month after the first miscarriage. I say first miscarriage, because the second pregnancy lasted about as long. At six weeks we had an ultrasound and at eight weeks we had another. The fetal progress had stopped. On February 25, 2009, I had a D&C.

There is so much that is blurry about those two pregnancies. I know that at one of the pregnancies we took Eliot with us to the OB for the ultrasound, so excited to share with him his new baby, but I can’t remember which pregnancy it was. (Thankfully, he never truly understood that because it was clear at the time of the ultrasound that it wasn’t going to happen.) The months that followed the second miscarriage pummeled me. Two deaths of close family members, rejection letters from the doctoral programs to which I had applied, and a near-death illness with one of our dogs accompanied repeated and failed attempts to get pregnant again.

What has happened is a fundamental shift from passive to active in our attempt to have a second child. My image and identity as a ‘reluctant mom’ is gone. A determination has set in. Over the last months, Eliot and I have been talking a lot about his desire for a new baby. He keeps asking me if there is a baby in my belly. When his friends, Charlie and Raulie, got new baby brothers last week (Oliver on Monday and Emilio on Tuesday), Eliot began telling people he was going to have a baby sister. What has proven most difficult to explain to him is the trying. I think it would almost be easier to just give up and say we are a 3 person (and multi-animal) family. It’s the trying that takes thick and callused skin. I haven’t decided yet if this quest is Quixotic or Sisyphusian or both. For now, I remain resolved.