My partner and I are both only children. We are the sole people responsible for our parents as they age, and we both know the joys and discomforts of being the sole recipient of parental expectations and attention. From an early point in our conversations about children, we were in complete agreement that we wanted two children.
Maybe it's watching a friend in the final weeks of her pregnancy with a second child, and watching yet another friend trying to get pregnant. Or it's looking at my daughter and seeing next to nothing babyish about her sturdy little girl frame or her flood of new words (including the dreaded "no"), but I've been feeling baby lust.
Baby lust has little to do with logic. In my case, after much soul searching, I can also admit that my baby lust has little or nothing to do with a baby.
My partner, who knows me far too well, asked me point blank why I wanted another baby today as opposed to a year or two from now. I mumbled something about the Little Mistress being so big, and made a bullshit argument that I just wanted to get having kids over with. After all, pregnancy sucks (for me, anyway), and the sooner we have #2, the sooner we won't have kids in diapers or middle of the night wake-ups and I can go back to work, and besides, babies are cute. I mean, have you SEEN the little hats with animal ears?!
As my voice sped up and rose in pitch and volume, my partner looked at me skeptically.
Which is when I realized I was full of shit.
I never did understand women who had babies for stupid reasons like "I wanted someone to love me" (which, for the record, was my mom's stated reason for having me when she got pregnant at 21 from a fling). Nor women who have babies to "fix" their marriages when a baby does nothing but put more stress on it.
Living in Southeast Asia, lonely and alien, I get it. The truth is that a pregnancy would give me something to do with clear goals and appointments. As a diabetic pregnant woman, I check my blood sugar ten times a day and give myself four shots. The last few weeks of a pregnancy, I'm at a doctor at least two, and often three times a week. And let's not forget all the puking—if that happens again, it's good for killing a few hours a day. Once the baby was born, I wouldn't notice that my partner was gone 12-plus hours a day because it would all be a messed-up blur of sleep deprivation anyway. By the time I surfaced from pregnancy and the first 12-20 weeks of kid #2's life, it would be almost time to possibly transfer from Asia to Europe or back to the US.
Put into stark terms, I want a baby because I'm bored, I'm lonely, and I want to kill time over the next few years.
I couldn't be more unfair to my second child.
"LM, we had you because we were at a great point in our marriage and were ready to become parents. #2, well…I was bored in Asia, so I got knocked up to help pass the time."
My husband then pointed out that at no point was I thinking about our marriage, its health, or our relationship.
With the Little Mistress's pregnancy, the only truly outstanding and frequent sex was the "let's get me knocked up sex." There's something about purposefully unprotected sex that is exciting and almost a bit forbidden; until then, your entire sexual existence was about preventing the very thing you're trying to bring about. Statistically you're best off having sex every other day for maximal exposure and highest odds (daily sex can lower the sperm quality, or so the books told us) if you're not peeing on ovulation predictor kits or charting your fertility via basal body temperature. Throwing caution to the wind made us fuck like bunnies.
But once I was pregnant, we learned the hard way that nothing killed a mood like my shrieking out "Get off me, I need to throw up." In the second trimester, once the puking was under control (thank you modern drugs); my nipples became sensitive to the point where I liked them to be played with for the first time ever—for a month or three, that is, until they became too sore to be touched.
We know all too well that post-baby sex is a challenge to fit into the haze of diapers, crying and sleep deprivation. It's not a pretty truth, but pregnancy and a newborn do not help strengthen a marriage. It is a sobering thought to imagine the challenge that sex with a newborn AND a young child would pose.
Today, we have a consistent weekly date for the first time since the LM was born over a year and a half ago. As a (hopefully) breastfeeding mom, date night would not be part of our life for months (assuming we could get #2 to eventually take a bottle of expressed milk). Do I really want to give up this vital weekly time alone with my partner? Our sex life is finally starting to return to normal. Do I really want to toss that out the window for another few years?
Baby Lust was clouding my mind, and I wasn't thinking enough about my marriage.
Baby Lust also wasn't fair to me. I struggle to find time to write on a regular basis now. Adding a second child isn't going to make finding writing time easier. I've also recently begun a love affair with photography, and while I like taking pictures of my child, I know I'll have far less freedom to go out and do urban landscapes with two of them. The baking projects I keep filed away on my laptop for "when I can find the time" will languish on the proverbial back burner for years.
Finally, my urges were unfair to the LM. She isn't a teeny little baby anymore, and she sleeps through the night, which any parent will tell you is a huge deal. She's also exploding with new words, and her curiosity about the world around her is unending. She is turning into a very cool little person. Do I want to rob myself of this time so I can puke and deal with the drama of a diabetic pregnancy?
So, no #2 this year. Sometime next year we'll re-examine the question—after we've been in Asia for a year, after we've decided if staying here for another few years is the right choice for our family, once we've adjusted to our new schedule of less time with each other and feel more secure in our marriage.
This doesn't mean my heart didn't melt as I unpacked a box of itty-bitty hats that the LM has long outgrown.
It does mean that I am going to make the most of the next year and enjoy those things that will be harder to come by when we decide that we have the right reasons to add to our family.
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