FORCES OF NURTURE : ‘Never again!’ fades as family’s love grows
Posted on Wednesday, September 3, 2008
They say plenty of people have
one child because they don’t know
any better . They can’t truly anticipate
how brain-scrambling the experience
is . The sleepless nights . Postpartum
depression . How your marriage temporarily takes a back seat , feels like
it’s falling apart and then , hopefully ,
reinvents itself .
Don’t even get me started on how
pregnancy destroys your body .
So having a second baby — on
purpose , no less — means you’re nuts , right ? You know what you’re
setting yourself up for . And this time ,
you can even imagine that it will be
more difficult because your attention
will be divided between children .
That said , here’s my confession :
When this column appears , I’ll be
almost 26 weeks pregnant .
I always said I wanted only one
child . Financially and emotionally , I felt like that was all we were
equipped for .
At 33 years old , my pregnancy
with Sophie was physically grueling . The two sides of my lower pelvis
separated , snapping during my second trimester , making it impossible
to exercise outside of a swimming
pool without excruciating pain .
I gained 70 pounds . ( For readers who haven’t been pregnant or
haven’t been pregnant lately , that’s
twice the normal limit. )
Toward the end of my pregnancy ,
I could hear my pelvic bones click
and grind against one another every time I rolled over in bed . As I winced, the voice inside my head whimpered, “If I survive this pregnancy, I will never ever do this to my body again.” As if to make up for the pain, God gave me the gift of an easy, quick delivery.
Sophie weighed just shy of 9 pounds. A big, beautiful and perfectly healthy baby.
But when I swore up and down we wouldn’t have another child, I wasn’t yet a mother. I knew I would love my baby, but I didn’t know how much I would love Sophie.
And I didn’t understand that I could love my husband more because of the father he would become. I didn’t know he could still surprise me with the tenderness, patience and selflessness he would show her. She made him a better man than he was when I married him.
But most of all, I didn’t understand what it would be like to want Sophie to have a family that is more than her mother and father. I don’t want her to have the burden of being the only one.
I want her to have a confidant and co-conspirator. Someone who will understand her like no one else on earth.
She deserves a sibling to carry the burden of her parents when they’re difficult and old. Someone she can complain to about us who will understand exactly what she means.
She needs a hand to hold at my funeral.
So, after many long talks, we decided to admit we were wrong about having an only child. As I faced my 36 th birthday, we decided to brush off all of our fears about money, about my diminishing chances of conception, about the heightened risk of birth defects and about what a second pregnancy could do to my body. As if the universe laughed at all of our fretting, we conceived almost immediately. Fingers crossed, all signs are that we’ll have a healthy baby boy who shares the same due date we had for Sophie. We tell her he will be her birthday present. But we know he’ll be a gift that is so much more. Cindy Murphy is a news reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. She and her husband take turns chasing their toddler, reviving their diabetic cat and trying not to confuse the two. E-mail her at cmurphy@arkansasonline. com
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