My husband and I both come from large, loving families. We enjoyed a bohemian lifestyle together before marrying, out and about partying most nights and travelling extensively. We made the decision to hit pause on our wild days and start our family, as we expected to follow our parents’ example and have five or six children.
Now that our child is a year old, I am questioning whether I want any more children. We adore our son utterly, but as sole caregiver I am absolutely exhausted and just want my identity back and to have fun with my husband again. He would like at least one more child but agrees that sleep deprivation has been much more challenging to our relationship than he had hoped.
Others around us say it is selfish to deprive our son of a sibling when we are so close to ours. What can we do to make (and reconcile ourselves with) a decision? Do we expand our family and postpone our post-children fun further? Do we have a responsibility to our son to give him the same relationship opportunities we have had?
Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. That means that if you took someone prisoner in a war, the UN would want you to be nicer to them than your newborn is currently being to you.
You know this, but it might be worth hearing it again, especially if your friends are calling you selfish (we’ll have words with them in a minute). Having a child is a rupture to your life and sense of self. You have to relearn how to wear your life and time and body while they keep changing how they fit. You are exhausted and doing your best; be gentle with yourself.
Let me start by reassuring you that whatever choice you make your kid will be fine. They can eat playdough and swallow coins. They’ll be fine with or without siblings. I didn’t have any. My high school best friend had eight. And our families were exactly the same where it counts; they were dens of chaos and love and where all the family ate breakfast together and we cared how each others’ day went. The only real difference was her family had to buy eight litres of milk at a time while mine got away with two. Your kid will be OK. Your only responsibility is to love them with everything you’ve got.
One of the challenges in making this kind of decision is that you don’t know what kind of person you’ll be after you’ve made it. You’ll have one kind of lifestyle if you have many more kids, you’ll have a different kind if you say one’s enough. It’s hard to make choices for your future self when your future self is the product of those choices. That means often the best you can do is just pick something and say it with your chest. But that can be a kind of relief – if there’s no perfect answer you don’t need to worry about the risk of not reaching it.
It also means you don’t need to be hard on yourself for realising you might have outgrown an old decision. When you made the five-kids plan you were doing the best you could by a future self. You are that future self now and you get to call the shots. You wanted five kids once but you’re a different kind of person now, and different kinds of people make different kinds of decisions. Things won’t get less chaotic from here, your kid is only going to keep growing. Life is a constant state of change; you have to give yourself permission to update as much as it does.
And these friends who are calling you selfish? Do me a favour: when you tell them to go stick their heads in a pig, say that with your chest, too.
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