Back in 2017, I wrote a post debating whether I should have a second child. I almost didn’t. We tried and tried. We even went to a fertility clinic. And then we decided it probably wasn’t meant to be. I was already 40. “Let’s give it two more months and then call it quits,” I told my husband.
And then there it was, the plus sign. I looked at it with mistrust. This had happened before. A plus and then, nothing. I went about my life. But the plus didn’t fade. The baby was real and (fuck!) a boy.
I wanted a second child, in part, because I wanted a do-over. I imagined having an unmedicated vaginal birth (the first had been a C-section). I breastfed my first, but it was excruciatingly painful. I could avoid that the second time around. After my first child was born, I walked around in a fog. I spent most of my time on the couch or in bed. Leaving the house felt scary and impossible. With a second baby, I’ll be more at ease, I thought. I’ll get to enjoy the early days.
I gave birth on January 6, 2020, with the help of Pitocin. My midwife left me in the care of her trainee, a woman I barely knew. The pain was more intense than anything I had ever experienced, and I had no idea how to deal with it. Eventually I agreed to an epidural. I didn’t know it at the time, but the anesthesiologist also administered a spinal block. So when I gave birth, I felt nothing. I had to have the nurse tell me when to push because I couldn’t feel the contractions.
“Ok. That didn’t go to plan,” I told myself. But you can still salvage these sweet newborn days. January and February aren’t the best months to take a newborn out into the world in Wisconsin, but I tried. We took him to a winter festival, and to see a kids’ performance at a local bar. See! I’m so relaxed. Look at me with a baby in a bar.
Then Covid hit. On February 29th, the day the first US citizen died, we took the kids to an international festival downtown. It was our last outing. By the middle of March, daycare was closed and we were under a “safer at home” order.
You know the rest because you lived it too. We hunkered. We sanitized. We took walks. Maternity leave turned into stay-at-home motherhood with an indefinite end date. I barely remember those days, but I made audio recordings. Here are a few excerpts.
March 28: There’s a global pandemic, and shit’s getting pretty real.
April 2: It’s weird to think about the future. There’s so much uncertainty right now. I don’t even know if there’s going to be summer camp. And then, what? Am I going to be on kid duty all summer long?
April 13: [Husband] is on paternity leave. I’m working in a closet in [daughter’s] room writing a story about medical residents who are being abused during the Covid crisis.
May 10: It’s Mother’s Day. No childcare right now … I’m stressed. We’re all stressed. It has been really hard.
May 29: No word yet on what this fall is going to look like, whether there will be public school, whether [daughter] is starting kindergarten. Trying to work and take care of the kids has been abysmal. I have been working until 1, 2, 2:30am and then the baby gets up two or three times a night. It’s bonkers. It’s completely unsustainable. Things are not great. Not great.
Things continued to be not great for a long time. I didn’t get my perfect do-over. None of us ever do. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that the future is entirely out of our control. We can’t know what’s to come until it’s happening. And that makes deciding whether to have a kid — or more kids — impossible. We try to imagine what it might be like, what might happen, how we might feel. But we can’t. We’re all just passengers on Space Mountain, racing through the dark, never knowing when the bottom will drop out.
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Image courtesy of Donnie Ray Jones via Flickr
The best thing about a second child is that it teaches you that you’re capable of endless love. When pregnant with my second, I truly feared I’d never be able to love another child as much as I loved my first. But of course, I did love her as much. The second child shows us just how big our hearts are. The pandemic has its own cruel lessons. But I’m glad you have your new son to teach you and yours even more lessons of love.
May Space Mountain deposit you on solid ground so you can get an ice cream before the ride starts back up.
Nothing but respect and admiration for every word here, Cassie, and every minute of that lived experience. And here you are, still going. That’s the most admirable of all.
Thanks for this post, Cassandra. I’ve been carrying your description of your experience around in my head the past few days, turning it over, and comparing it to my experiences giving birth to each of my children.
And just now, I remembered something that I experienced that really helped me. A few midwives and nurses in our area teamed up and hosted a series of birth story share events seven years ago. The first story share I attended with a friend, a mom and a philosopher, and we sat stunned by story after story. Twins conceived unexpectedly! A British professor living in the US who went home to give birth because she wanted to have a child in a familiar place. Women told so many stories of pain, and heartbreak, and success and surrender. People who had given birth decades before came to share, and the sting of still sharp disappointment, discomfort, or fear startled us.
The second birth story share I went to, I told the story of my miscarriage, an experience both beautiful and strange, made only acceptable by my having heard of a friend’s miscarriage a few years before and the ways she responded to it (mostly with surprising curiosity).
May we all make our way to the solace we so need and crave.