8 pm and both my girls are sound asleep. The kitchen is filthy and the playroom is a hurricane of legos, cap-less markers, zebra drawings, and tiny plastic bunnies. The mess keeps calling out– Clean me, clean me… But here I am, live in the blogosphere instead! If I become a real blogger, our house will take a hit.

I found this early photo of A. and C. in the babyjogger, C. in full-on screaming mode. Photographic evidence that the months after C. was born were the hardest of my life. I’ve blocked out most of my memories from that time, or maybe my brain did the job unconsciously, the way a woman’s body releases hormones so she won’t remember the pain of childbirth. Call it “Momnesia.” When you can’t remember how bad it was having a newborn and a toddler, and you actually consider doing it again.

The urge to have more children is a powerful one. T. and I both come from big families– he’s the youngest of 3, I’m the oldest of 4. So having only two kids seems small, average, boring, even lame somehow. Then we do a reality check on our current situation, how our heads are still barely above water with our two live-wire girls. This morning they both woke at 5:40 a.m. like they were shot out of a cannon. How could we add a new baby to the mix?

Maybe no matter how many children you have, it’s sad to come to the point where you say, “Okay, this is it. This is my family.” The era of fertility and procreation is over, all the adolescent fantasies of what your future family will be dissolve in the truth of the present. That delicious potential of another new being is gone. From now on, you’re just growing older.

I don’t mean to sound cynical. But it’s hard to accept the finality of “being done.” Perhaps that’s part of what motivates Octo-Mom and Brangelina to keep birthing and/or adopting more babies. In college I used to say casually, “I’m going to have 4 or 5 kids.” I might have even used the phrase as a pick-up line at some off-campus party at The Happy Home. Naive doesn’t even begin to describe my outlook on parenting when I was twenty. I took for granted my free time, my sleep, my perky breasts, my adventurous path as a world traveler.

But I wouldn’t go back there now. Maybe for a day. Maybe for a weekend of hiking the White Mountains with my best friends, but not for much longer. Not without A. and C.– I’d miss them too much.

Tags: No Comments