The Challenge of the Second Child
getting real about the transition from one to two children
I recently read Angela Garbes’ Like a Mother. In it, this passage hit me like a ton of bricks:
“Nearly a year after our daughter was born, my husband and I went out to dinner to celebrate our anniversary. As we sat there, martini glasses between our fingers, he asked me how I was feeling.
“Honestly,” I told him, “that feels like an irrelevant question. I’m just doing stuff.”
I was stunned to find that, as someone who spent more of her twenties writing down the subtle contours of every feeling in a journal and crying, I was now saying that feelings were irrelevant, an impediment to getting through each day. But it was true. It was far easier and far more useful to talk about the things that needed to get done – grocery shopping, bill paying, taking out the garbage, feeding our daughter, getting her down for a nap – than the emotions I experienced while doing them.
I had been exposed for the beast I truly was; my primary concern was enduring. It was only after about eighteen months that the richness of life – a less debilitating sense of tiredness, being able to notice the changing of the seasons – began to creep back in. Around the same time, our daughter started to be able to show us real affection. I feel like I just came up for air, I told a friend. I didn’t realize I had been drowning. I began to feel like myself – or at least a more familiar version of myself – again.”
I didn’t realize I had been drowning. I related to that phrase so very much. Early motherhood is so overwhelming in its demands that it sometimes feels like a marathon that will never end. But it does end, eventually, as Garbes notes. Your child begins to sleep through the night (WARNING: this is not guaranteed). They will be able to verbalize what they want (WARNING: this is not guaranteed). Their schedules will cease to be so set in stone and imperative, (i.e. if one thing goes awry you’ll be paying for it for the rest of the day). Also, WARNING: THIS IS NOT GUARANTEED.
But, if you decide to have another child, you go back to square one.
Do not underestimate what this will do to your sanity.
Right when Garbes felt like she could finally come up for air, when her child was 18 months old, I was pregnant with my second. When my oldest was two years and three months old, I boomeranged right back to the beginning and was the parent of an infant again. My recognition of the fact that I had been drowning? It was delayed. By years. In fact, sometimes I wonder if I didn’t really come up for air until my youngest went to kindergarten. And then, when the pandemic hit months later, that was why I became so angry. I had just been able to breathe again, and then I felt like I was shoved under water so deep I wasn’t sure when I would ever be able to see the surface.
I wasn’t in denial about how hard life could be with two kids under three. I’ve long said that the first eleven months of my second child’s life were the hardest period of my life to date. I likely was dealing with undiagnosed PPD. But I also think I was vastly unprepared for how difficult that second child can be, especially when your children are close in age. There would be no napping when the baby was sleeping, no quiet nursing sessions on the couch. My toddler was always underfoot and it wasn’t like she didn’t need anything from me. I was faced with an avalanche of needs, every single day.
I always wanted two children, and for them to be close in age. But in my idealizing about my future family, I didn’t think to factor in what that would require of me, as the mother. I didn’t realize that this would mean that my body would be hijacked for a period of three years. Nine months of pregnancy + one year of nursing. I enjoyed a respite of four months and then experienced another nine months of pregnancy + six more months of nursing. Three years where my body was not my own.
We didn’t exactly plan to have them quite so close together. But I didn’t go back on birth control after the birth of my first child. I breastfed for a year, and even the birth control that was safe for nursing mothers came with the risk that it might dry up my milk supply. Then, by the time I’d stopped nursing, we knew that sometime within the next year we would start trying for baby #2. Maybe around our child’s second birthday. But then, one day in the fall, just four short months after my daughter turned one, I realized my period was late. Plus I’d felt a sharp jabbing pain in my uterus when I got up from bed first thing in the morning. I’d remembered that sensation during the early days of pregnancy #1.
I took a pregnancy test, hoping that I was just being paranoid. But my intuition is rarely wrong. My suspicions were confirmed.
As I stared at the stick that determined my future, the overwhelming feeling I remember was bemused shock. I knew I wasn’t ready. It wasn’t yet time.
This was the second time that I’d become pregnant without trying. This meant that I experienced pregnancy as something that happened to me rather than something I chose. Motherhood was an imposition rather than an intention. Sure, I wanted to be a mother, but it never happened on my own terms. It kept feeling forced on me before I was ready.
I recognize that these surprise pregnancies are a privilege. I have watched loved ones struggle with infertility and witnessed how heartbreaking it can be to desire a pregnancy and not be able to produce one. I know there is secondary infertility, where women struggle to provide a longed for sibling for their child they already have. But I wonder about the mother I could have been if I hadn’t had my children so close together. Sometimes I even wonder about the mother I would be if I had been brave enough to admit that maybe I was okay with just having one.
Don’t get me wrong. I cannot imagine my life without both of my children. I love that my children have siblings. But I can’t deny that having a second child was traumatic for me as a mother.
I never used to be able to claim the word trauma, to recognize that it was something that had happened to me. While reading Christie Tate’s book GROUP, and about her own traumatic experience in adolescence, as I had been doing for the last twenty years, I told myself I didn’t really experience trauma in my life. This, despite the fact that I lost my father to cancer when I was only 19. How was that not a traumatic experience? Finally, I recognized that I was lying to myself. What else was a trauma in my life that I had been completely blind to, looking the other way, convincing myself that everything was okay?
I soon realized that my experience having my second child was traumatic. Again, undiagnosed PPD cast every part of this experience in shadows. Plus, while her sister had been an easy baby, my second child had her nights and days mixed up for weeks. She had a tongue tie so struggled nursing. She had acid reflux so I had to limit my dairy intake and we had her sleep in one of those rockers that have now been taken off the market because they have suffocated babies.
Then this: two months into becoming a mother of two, my oldest child broke her arm. On my watch.
We had taken a trip down to Carmel for a few days. We were desperate to get out of the house, escape the self-imposed exile of the newborn days. My husband and I had gotten married in Carmel years ago, and thus it was a special place for us as a family, and only an hour and a half from our home in the Bay Area. This particular day, my mother had driven down to join us. We were walking along the pedestrian pathway that runs along Scenic Drive overlooking the white sands of Carmel Beach. My oldest was in an umbrella stroller, and my infant in her Orbit car seat and stroller base. We had not yet splurged for a double stroller, something that would become essential in the months to come. My mother had taken our dog down to the beach, and let him off leash, a tricky bargain with our dog who tended to get a bit aggressive. Nothing bad, but he had a nasty bark. It was a good thing he was little or people might have been scared.
My husband and I stopped along the path at one of the benches lining the walk. My oldest climbed up to the top of one, and sat there sweetly, gazing out at the ocean and singing “Edelweiss” in soft, dulcet tones. My husband watched as our dog started to chase after another dog in his not-so-nice way. He decided to go down and help my mother, leaving me with the two children on the pathway.
Not two minutes after he left, my infant naturally began to fuss. I turned to tend to her, and then heard my toddler cry out. I spun around and she was splayed on the ground, tears spilling from her eyes. She was holding on to her wrist.
I quickly rushed to pick her up and calm her down. It wasn’t a big fall, but the bench was higher than most. I was sure she was scared more than hurt. She usually calmed pretty easily but this time, her cries were only escalating. By the time my mother, husband and our disobedient dog had reached us, both children were wailing at the top of their lungs. My infant because I was now tending to her sister, and ignoring her needs; my toddler because it was quickly becoming clear she had truly injured herself.
I tried to explain what had happened, that I had turned away just for a moment. I felt guilty, delinquent, but what was I supposed to do? This was the struggle of two children. There wasn't enough of me to go around!
My husband put our toddler in her stroller and began the long walk home while I finally took our two-month old out to see if feeding her would fix her. By the time my mother and I got back to the house, my husband was strapping our toddler in her car seat to take her to Urgent Care in Monterrey. When they returned hours later, his fears were confirmed. She had a small fracture in her wrist. Because she was so young, her bones still growing so quickly, there was no need for a cast. They gave us a small splint to put on her arm to encourage her to be gentle with it, but other than that, it would fuse back together on its own.
This was good news, but I couldn’t help but feel responsible, like this was proof that I was in over my head. But there was nothing to be done. This was our life now. There were no backsies, no do-overs, no mulligans. I wasn’t sure I felt equipped for what this life required of me, but it was too late.
I’m not sure any mother of two children under three feels confident, competent, or up to the task. We put our heads down and focus on getting through each day with our children alive. Survival mode. Enduring, as Garbes writes. It doesn’t have to be this hard. We could acknowledge how taxing the care of young people is, value caretaking as a society, provide more support for mothers so that they do not have to weather the storm alone.
But I can’t help but wonder what my experience would have been if I had waited a bit longer to have another child. If I had allowed myself to be restored a bit more, so I wasn’t so depleted. What was so difficult was not just the endless conveyor belt of demands but that I gave birth to my second child right on the cusp of when I was beginning to feel more like myself again after the annihilation of the infant days. Beginning to come up for air.
If I had put off having a second child a bit longer, my oldest would have headed off to preschool a few days a week. Even on those days that she wasn’t in preschool, I might have allowed myself to hire a babysitter to have more time for my work. But because I boomeranged back to the beginning, with the constant demands of breastfeeding making any progress I had made carving out space of my own obsolete, I gave up that pursuit. I just threw up my hands. Kept thinking that one day, it wouldn’t be this way. I put my needs on ice.
In having children close in age, I was focused on the experience I wanted for my children, rather than on what was best for me as a mother. It didn’t help that I received pressure to keep procreating everywhere I went. People start inquiring about when you’ll have another as soon as your first starts walking. It is presumed that you will give your child a sibling. There remains such a stigma about only children, an overall tone of “why would you screw up your child that way?” if you dare to entertain the option of stopping at one. We convince women to give the gift of a sibling to their child, without taking into account how much it will derail her life right when it is finally being returned to her.
Down the road, it will be worth it, people say. But what about the years until later? Why must we require women to lay down their lives, sacrifice their bodies, just for a presumed future? What if we could expand our ideas about the ideal family so that women were not just expected to be breeding machines, setting their careers and creative pursuits on hold for years for some idealized experience? What if that is just requiring too much?
This is why access to not only birth control but abortion is so essential. A much overlooked statistic is the fact that 60% of women looking to obtain an abortion are already mothers. While much of the discourse about these mothers is about how they fear lack of resources for the children they already have, what if an underlying, unspoken factor is that they want to save themselves? They want to protect their own resources, their own time, their own progress they have made in career or work-life balance, their own sanity? And isn’t that their right?
This topic seems to be popping up everywhere I look. In one mother’s group online, a mother wrote: “I feel like I was a better mother to my kid when there was just one. I was much saner, less thinly spread, and had more time for my own humanity….I’m just pissed at all the fine print I feel was song-and-danced past us to make us agree to more breedings without our true consent.”
Another reported: “I have a friend who is a poet and has one child and when her daughter was a preschooler she flat out told me she was only having one because she loved her creative life too much and she knew more than one child would require sacrifices to her art that she didn’t want to make. I wish more people felt comfortable to talk openly about this. As much as we love our children, the impact on creative work is real and it’s not helping anyone to make it a taboo subject.”
When I mentioned the topic of this post to another friend, she nodded her head in solidarity. “When I had my second, I would walk around with both kids in the stroller and people would come up and exclaim over my new baby,” she said. “Sometimes I would joke: “You can have her.” And I wasn’t always joking.”
This is the level of overwhelm new mothers often feel, and yet we don’t hear the discourse. There is still something shameful about bringing these very honest and understandable feelings out into the open.
I will admit that all of the mothers I quote above are writers. And there is something about the mother who craves the space to write who feels hemmed in by motherhood in a very specific way. Writing requires time. Writing requires quiet. It is also not often lucrative, thus it is incredibly hard to continue to make room for a pursuit that doesn’t pay for the childcare it requires.
“My husband could see I had a novel inside me, and it was a commotion, and the only way to settle it was to write it, and the only way to write it was to be alone. I had not been alone in a decade. I had not been alone because I am a mother, and a mother is never alone. When she is washing, sleeping, raging, she is not alone. For a mother, this is the state of things. Children hang from your clothing. They pummel you with questions. Like a gunfight, like the most consuming love, like an apocalypse: they take up all of the available space.”—Claudia Dey, “Mothers As Makers of Death,” The Paris Review
Obviously people are allowed to create the family structures that work for them or that they desire. There are some women who love the baby days, who relish the experience of “dripping with children,” as Glennon Doyle aptly describes it, who want to have a large bustling family and are comfortable with the sacrifices that its creation requires. What I want us to alter as a society is the presumption that people will have more children, or mothers should do it before they are truly ready. What I want us to be open about is the fact that to add more children to the family creates additional burden on the mother. Sometimes a mother does not have it in her to go through another pregnancy if her first was difficult (anyone else watch the Amy Schumer documentary about her struggle with hyperemesis gravidarum?). Sometimes one child is just enough. Sometimes there are other creative pursuits calling outside of the expectations from our wombs.
FURTHER READING
It Feels Like Every Mom I Know Is Medicated, Miranda Rake, Romper.
“Is there something uniquely challenging about the modern perinatal experience — defined as pregnancy and the first year postpartum — that requires so many of us to be medicated in order to meet its demands?”
American Women Are Not Okay, Lyz Lenz, Substack: Men Yell at Me
Women Are Having Fewer Babies Because They Have More Options, Jill Filopovic, The New York Times
Loved and Wanted: A Memoir of Choice, Children and Womanhood, Christa Parravani
This book outlines the author’s desire for an abortion when she found herself pregnant with her third child, and the lack of access to said abortion despite it being legal in the state in which she resides, West Virginia.
The Secret to Being Both a Successful Writer and a Mother: Have Just One Kid, The Atlantic, Lauren Sandler
One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One, Lauren Sandler
If you resonate with my writing, please consider posting a comment or liking this post. You can do that directly from this email. Here, I will put a couple of buttons right here to make it easy for you!
If you would like to go back and read my past posts, they are all available on the Substack website here. If you truly enjoyed a post, please share it via social media or with friends who you think might resonate with it. If you have a friend with a podcast who might like to have me on as a guest, please let me know. I am actively trying to increase my platform and reach.
Thank you for this! My kid is 3.5 and we’ve debated another for awhile now. For so long, I felt that moms who had multiples were just more competent than me but now I’m coming around to the idea that I just want an easier, cushier life than I would have with 2 and that’s okay.
As an only child myself I really thought I wanted multiple children if I had children. Then I had one. And she was sick and in the hospital for months at a time. I was exhausted and overwhelmed and (although I didn’t recognize it at the time) grieving for both the life I no longer had and for the life I thought I would have.
Yet I still held stubbornly to the idea that to be a good mother I “must” have more than one.
It wasn’t until my husband asked me,” so which one will you leave behind?” When I stared at him blankly he continued,” every time our daughter is in the hospital you stay there with her, so what happens to the next one? Will you leave the one we have alone in the hospital or will you leave the baby at home? You can’t be both places so you will always have to choose and your already struggling with the inability to write while caring for the child we have”.
I hated him for that statement. And I’m grateful for his honesty- even if it was harsh.
Because he wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t do more when I was already barely surviving as is.
My daughter is amazing. I love being her mother. But motherhood??? I wish I’d been given more realistic warnings about just how complicated the journey would be.