When my daughter Annika was four months old, in a moment of insanity triggered by having enjoyed no more than six hours of continuous sleep since she was born, I informed my husband that she would be an only child, and I meant it.
The amount of care that is required to bring a single life into the world and sustain it is patently ridiculous. I get the Darwinism survival-of-the-fittest concept, but even by nature’s standards, this is absurd. The same basic amount of care that goes into the rearing of a serial killer goes into the upbringing of a virtuoso. Everyone’s diapers ultimately need changing, and until you know who or what your little bugger is going to grow into, you’ve got to go on faith. Lots of it.
That my ancient ancestors managed to keep humanity going while holed up in a cave somewhere without any of the modern conveniences blows my mind. That my very Catholic relatives on my dad’s side regularly crank out 10 to 12 children with all the modern conveniences — families with six or fewer kids are considered suspiciously small — no longer seemed heroic. Try insane.
I began to stare in wonder at people with three children in the grocery store. They’d gone through this once and opted to do it twice more? Seriously?
No one in America talks this way, but everyone thinks it.
All of which makes it a bit difficult to explain what I’m doing on maternity leave again, just 21 months after the birth of my daughter. Contrary to the Hallmark and TLC Channel version of these events, you don’t actually fall truly, deeply, completely in love with your child the moment they place her in your arms. That happens somewhere between month nine and month 12 for most women I know, later still for men.
But once it does, it pretty much levels you. You are only slightly more rational than you were the first time you fell in love at the age of 15, except that this blows that away. Before then you of course love your little bugger in that hormonally hazy maternally instinctual way, but not the way you do as they grow.
People warned us about the nine-month trap, after the sleep deprivation haze fades and the child starts to do stuff like look up at you and smile. Something happens around that time that makes you forget what you went through to get here, or if not to forget completely, then to minimize it in your mind. Or it could just be that extreme sleep deprivation has been scientifically proven to blur the memory. Whatever the case, around that time, a second child, a completely overwhelming concept just months before, can seem like a smashing idea.
This is essentially how baby Gabriel became part of our family in December.
There is no clinical term for this phenomenon, which I believe is hormonal and affects both men and women, but it is very real, and the reason, I believe, that the average space between siblings in America is two-and-a-half years. (You do the math.)
No matter how many you have, you soon learn that there is something much harder about raising kids than the initial sleep deprivation. It’s the deployment of the word “no,” which starts around 12 months.
This appeared deceptively simple when I was an outsider to the world of parenting, when I’d tsk-tsk at those parents with the noisy, out-of-control kids. How hard could it be to just say “no” consistently and mean it?
Turns out, it can be agonizing. After nearly a year on the philosophy of one of those parenting books, I thought I had it down cold. Annika was a perfectly scheduled toddler who ate and slept at the same exact times each day and walked herself to her crib at bedtime without us asking her to. (That may sound rigid, but kids really do love the security of predictability.)
Then came teething and a long series of painful earaches. At bedtime, she’d whimper and want to be rocked to sleep because she felt crappy, a process that can take hours. That made sense at first, until you realized that three nights of rocking her to bed when she didn’t feel good meant up to a week of her crying for you to rock her after she got better. Which does a good, loving parent do? Maintain the schedule so she doesn’t go through the week of crying herself to sleep afterward, or baby her when she’s sick? Like I said, it can be agonizing, particularly when your child cries like her heart is breaking.
I’ve spent hours debating the gray areas of the word “no” with my husband. When do you baby them and when do you lay down the law? No other single quandary has caused me to question myself more as a person. Holding back a “no” can be as difficult as letting one fly as you struggle for the right balance of discipline and nurture, a dilemma that begins to color every decision you make for your kids the older they get.
I haven’t found the perfect balance yet. If you have, please let me know.
This article appears in Jan 26 – Feb 1, 2010.
