Despite God's friendly intervention a couple of weeks ago, I can still get sad once in awhile about not having a second baby. Sometimes I get sad with very little provocation: a columnist for our local paper, who has just adopted her second, writes something about "My kids," and my heart goes thunking into my pelvic girdle because I will never say those words.
Other times, it takes quite a bit to overload me, like showing up at our Munchkin Music class to find two women visibly pregnant with their second while two others loudly discuss their current efforts to become so. "Look how sleepy Eric is!" I said. "I don't think he'll have any fun if we stay, so I'd better take him home." This was both true and a convenient excuse.
My therapist says an experience like that is called being flooded. Even flooded, I wasn't fleeing a storm of grief, and I didn't go to the car and cry. I just decided, on a fairly rational level, that it would be mean to make myself stay there and smile at a bunch of women enjoying an experience I will never have.
Sometimes, people ask me right out whether David and I are planning another baby. If the person who asks is a relative stranger, like another mom at playgroup, I just say cheerily, "Nope." If I feel I must make it clear that I am a happy mom, and not someone who decided not to have a second because she hated having the first so much, I say sorrowfully, "I would have liked a second baby, but I recently learned that I won't be able to." Then I put on a happy face and say, "So we're just focusing on enjoying the one terrific little guy we've got!"
It is helpful to have a stock answer prepared to meet the inevitable questions. It helps me, for instance, fend off an overload of sympathy. Perhaps you've experienced this? Common sense would tell us that if we're sad, we want others to be sad on our behalf. But I have found that the more sincere someone else's disappointment about my loss is, especially if it exceeds my own in the moment, the more insupportable it is, and the more I wish they would just go away (this does not hold true for very close friends). I guess it has something to do with being quite busy managing my own sorrow, thank you very much. This is the impetus for the happy-face turnaround mentioned above: a signal to anyone who might be about to give me a long, heartfelt hug with teary eyes that it is time to get happy again.
Second, the details of why I can't have a baby are very complicated. If I actually explain it to people, I practically have to put on a PowerPoint presentation featuring the following slides:
Not one person to whom I have given this presentation has suggested that David and I were perhaps a bit hasty in deciding to limit our family size to three. My obstetrician was ready to send me directly to the lab for pre-pregnancy blood workups, but with that single exception, everyone else, from my therapist to my dad, has united with us in our decision.
It's a good decision, and I like to own it as such: David and I could have proceeded with a second pregnancy, after all, despite the horrors of the treatments I would require, despite the risks to me and little Baby Number 2. It's important to me to acknowledge that things were not entirely out of our hands. Sure, the decision was an easy one, in the same way that deciding not to enter a pit full of death-dealing vipers is easy, but it was still a decision, one we have to live with.
When we were trying to decide whether to have a first baby, I was struck one day by the sense that there was some person out there in the universe who would not come into being unless we opened a door for him to enter the world. I have been glad every moment that we opened that door for Eric. I am sorry that we will never know who might have come through had we opened it again.
Posted by Su Penn at April 22, 2003 02:53 PM | TrackBack