the second child conundrum

on the bags of clothes in my son's closet and the baby who may never wear them

Before we get into today's slightly difficult essay, some good news. Yesterday I was published in the New York Times' Modern Love section with a Tiny Love Story — a format that challenges writers to tell a love story in 100 words or less. Mine is about Bubba, my stuffed monkey, whom you may remember from my essay on parenting with OCD. He is now very famous. He is handling it with the humility and grace you'd expect from a good stuffed monkey (stuffed monkeys who forget where they came from are the worst, am I right?)

Here it is!

Now, on with the show.

There are bags in my son's closet. Bags and bags and bags. They contain every onesie, swaddle, impossibly small sock he has ever outgrown, washed and folded and saved for his younger sibling, who doesn’t exist. The bags don’t know this. The bags are very confident. And every time I open his closet to get him a t-shirt, they look at me. My son shares his closet with a sibling he doesn't have. He’s two, and he has no idea he's the older brother in a one-brother operation.

Two kids was always my plan. It wasn't really a question or discussion, it was just a fact about my future the way my address was a fact, the way my face was a fact. My older brother and I are three years apart, and I wanted that exact gap.

me and my beloved broseph

I’ve watched my son with other children and with babies and I know that he was built to be somebody's big brother. He has the temperament for it. He has the patience for it (well… he might have the patience for it. …Fine. He doesn’t have the patience for it yet, but he probably would could through force.) And then there’s the other reason for wanting a second child, the one I'm less proud of: I would like, someday, to rewatch Love Island Season 6 in peace. I dreamed of two children partly so they could love each other and partly so they could entertain each other while their mother lies on the couch watching adults in swimwear and botched Botox make catastrophic decisions. Both of these reasons for wanting another child are true, because I contain multitudes, and those multitudes contain Love Island.

But I’ve done the math, and the math has done me. My son is twenty-seven months old. To achieve the three-year gap — the dream gap, the brother gap — I would have to start trying tomorrow. Not "soon," not "when things settle down." Tomorrow.

I’m going to say this next part quickly like a weather report because if I get too deep into it I will cry on Thursday morning and I don’t wanna do that because I have some sourdough bulk fermenting in the kitchen and I need my eyes to ensure that the fermentation is correct: I have been out of steady work for over a year. We are hemorrhaging debt. I recently borrowed money from my parents to pay for a biopsy for our dog, and if the biopsy comes back the wrong way, the surgery is a sum we do not have, which is its own essay I am not emotionally prepared to write. We sold a car. We are having serious conversations about moving in with family, conversations that begin with "just temporarily" and trail off into silence. That's the weather. Back to you in the studio.

So. Tomorrow’s not happening.

When you say this to people, they’re kind, and their kindness comes in the form of a chorus. Bigger age gaps are a gift. My cousin waited six years and it's the best thing she ever did. You'll appreciate it, the older one is so helpful. My best friend had her second when her daughter was five, and it is going beautifully, and I genuinely am happy for her. However. I’m doing the math nobody in the chorus is doing: when my son is five, I will be forty. The chorus never mentions this part because the chorus is not the one who has to be pregnant.

And look — women are having children at forty. Women are having children at forty-four. I am pro this, I am marching in this parade, I will hold a sign. But being philosophically in favor of something and wanting it for your own specific body are two different things, a distinction I have also had to make about camping. Can I personally handle being pregnant at forty? I have a big fat buttload of health issues. I had a horrible pregnancy in which I gained 90 lbs and got gestational diabetes and a whole slew of other unattractive and undesirable side effects. So I don't know. Will our finances be repaired by then, or will we still be down in the hole with a flashlight? I don't know that either. The second child conundrum is not actually one question. It's a nesting doll of questions, and every doll you open has a smaller, meaner doll inside it, and the smallest doll just says regret in a tiny voice.

Because that's the real question, isn't it. Which regret do you want? Door number one: you have the second child, you get double the love, the photographs are unbearable in the good way, and the stress possibly kills you, or at minimum takes up residence. Door number two: you don't, and you spend some unknowable number of moments for the rest of your life wondering what might have been, and whether you did right by your son, who never asked for a sibling but also never asked not to have one.

I did what any anxious person does when they can't feel their way to an answer, which is that I looked up the research, as if the answer to my heart's dilemma might be in a peer-reviewed journal. The research is lovely and there’s decades of it. Only children turn out fine. Better than fine — the studies keep finding they're just as sociable and well-adjusted as kids with siblings, and slightly ahead on achievement and self-esteem. The lonely, spoiled only child is essentially a Victorian rumor that outlived the Victorians. I read all of this, every reassuring word of it, and I felt absolutely nothing. Because the research answers the question "will he be okay?" and that was never the question. He'll be okay. The question is whether I will.

The strongest counterargument, the one that burrows under my skin, is the long-game argument. Nobody who makes it is talking about childhood. They're talking about the end — about who splits the eldercare with you, who else remembers the exact smell of your parents' kitchen, who you call when there's no one left who knew you at seven. My brother is that person for me, and I know exactly what that's worth. But I also know siblings who haven't spoken in a decade, and I know that a sibling is a lottery ticket, not a guarantee, and I know — even in my most desperate bargaining moods — that you cannot have a baby as a retirement plan for your first baby.

I’ve met plenty of the "just be happy with what you have" people, and they are well-meaning and correct and I would also like to gently push them into a pool. It's not that they're wrong. I do have one amazing kid. On paper the answer is easy, obvious, and writes itself. It's that saying yes to the obvious answer means kissing a dream goodbye, and I have kissed so many dreams goodbye at this point that my lips are chapped. Career dreams. Homeownership dreams. Vague, glittering versions of my life that dissolved while I was busy surviving the actual one. Usually a dream dies slowly and politely, and you don't even notice the funeral. This one is different. It has a deadline, and the deadline is my body, and my body turns thirty-eight and then, with what I can only describe as poor taste, keeps going.

I recognize I’m not alone in this. I have to believe this economy is producing a whole generation of only children, a cohort of kids whose sibling exists only in a spreadsheet their parents closed and never reopened. Someday sociologists will write about them. The kids will be fine. The research says so.

In the meantime, the bags are still in my son's closet. A more evolved woman would donate them — some other baby could be wearing those socks right now, this minute, and that thought is supposed to bring me peace and instead brings me to my knees. A more decisive woman would keep them proudly, an announcement, a plan. I am neither of those women. I am the woman who took the bags out last month to make room for his summer shirts, held them for a while, and put them back.

That’s where the essay is supposed to resolve. It doesn’t. I feel bad about the bags. I will probably feel bad about the bags for a long time, possibly forever, possibly until the day I either fill them or empty them, and I honestly could not tell you which of those endings is the happy one.

Right now, my son needs a T-shirt. I open his closet, reach past the bags, and find one. Then I close the closet door — and, possibly, the door on a dream.

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