Did I really need another baby for my family to be complete?
The way my husband communicated to me that I had won my campaign to have a third child was via a greeting card when our existing children were roughly 3 and 1.
The card featured a painting of a large bear — that was me! — and three smaller ones.
“Three bears,” he had written inside the card with characteristic economy. I remember triumphantly texting a photo of this card to my mom-friend chat, with whom many texts had been exchanged about the relative merits of having three children. This victory was the culmination of lobbying that took the form of many “jokes” and a smaller number of serious conversations that began shortly after our second baby was born.
This second baby would lie serenely next to me in bed in our sunny room, and I felt sublimely content when I looked at her. She was a little velvety creature with a lot of black hair and very fat cheeks and tufts of fur on the tips of her ears, just like her sister at that age. Who wouldn’t want another one? My husband, who was my co-parent and the primary breadwinner for our household, wasn’t so sure.
Our financial situation, good in the statistical, on-paper sense, felt rocky in San Francisco, where the state had just put the low-income threshold for a family of four at the bananas figure of $117,000/year. And this period of intense lobbying had also been, when I look back at it, a period of great stress and poor mental health.
The velvety creature and I had been in that sunny room for only a few weeks when our landlady died; her cousin sold the termite-munched two-bedroom we rented from her to someone who had $830,00 in cash. I got pneumonia two weeks after the baby was born and was functionally unable to parent my precious, rambunctious almost-3-year old, who was hating life with this interloper.
I was racing through the edits to my first book and barely hanging on to a part-time web job.
Our new landlord, when we moved into a less sunny place nearby, oscillated alarmingly between periods of gregarious lucidity and accusations that we were working for the FBI and possibly tampering with a classic car he kept in the locked garage.inside my brain, don’t just conjure up from looking at photos on my phone—are mostly of things like gripping the steering wheel of a Zipcar on the way to Ikea and telling myself to get it together, or chain-smoking under a bottlebrush tree on the corner of my block while my kids were at day care and I was supposed to be working.
I remember the moment when, standing in the kitchen having a serious conversation with my husband, I really allowed myself to do the math of what day care and rent cost and how our current monthly income did not equal that number. I remember the moment when we decided to move away and my husband began searching for jobs in cities that would be more affordable.
It was shortly before our move — likelySo we moved, and the third-baby conversation was put on hold while we packed up and started over in a new place. A few months later, COVID ushered in a period that not only killed the conversation entirely, but left meabout my innate abilities to parent the children I already had.
Over the course of a year-plus of online kindergarten and extended preschool closure, the idea dissipated like smoke, even before I learned the cosmic scheduling joke that is the 8 a.m.–to–2:30 p.m. school day and the 170-day school year, or about the activities that non-infants do and what they cost in time and money. I learned, basically, that a society so devoted to neoliberal economics that it refuses even to mandate paid maternity leave is similarly shitty and unaccommodating with regard to raising older children. My IUD started acting up, and I realized I had been doing invasive contraception for nearly two decades. My husband got a vasectomy. Case closed.announced the impending third baby of Natalie Portman, my gynecologist prescribed me estrogen cream for what I can describe only as vaginal malaise.
A week later, I, woke up in a puddle of sweat. The next step, my doctor tells me, is taking the menopause class offered by my insurance provider. Portman is two years older than I am, which means I am old enough to be mostly inoculated against the urge to compare myself to celebrities.
But I did get a mirthless chuckle out of the fact that this woman who had been a lifelong benchmark of unattainable, effortless-seeming beauty was now modeling a chic, leisurely, mature pregnancy in Paris while my own shit was starting to dry up. –style jealousy, rather than the soul-curdling rage that has become customary in the years since my second child was born. The hits keep coming.
After working with hundreds of other people toin my county, I watched a yearslong backlash from our ostensibly liberal, wealthy neighbors who were asked to fund it via a modest marginal income tax. I watched a vice-president oozing religious fervor decry the declining birth rate as his, a living embodiment of women’s willingness to debase themselves to align with power, become pregnant with their fourth child.
I watched Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt get praised for, where her job is to spew Stormfront-level hate about brown women and their babies. I watched politicians who are supposed to share my values fail to issue even the most milquetoast condemnation of the murder of uncountable children with U.S.-made bombs. I’m aware, too, of my good luck.
I have watched people near and far from me embark on fertility and adoption journeys that are physically, emotionally, and financially apocalyptic or endure the shattering grief of pregnancies that don’t result in a living baby. I have watched people navigate violent bureaucracies to try to protect queer households and trans kids from fascism, or grow families with defiant joy in spite of the eugenicist logic that governs the world around them.
I know that having two healthy children is a gift beyond words. My babies are now 11- and 8-year-old people, and I have moved into a parenting phase that has almost no bearing on the full-body fatigue and hypervigilance of parenting toddlers. My nervous system is in a completely different place than it was eight years ago, and when I see parents wrangling little ones in a grocery store or airport, I literally thank God that this is not me.
But I can’t kick the envious pang I feel when I find out that women of my acquaintance are having a third child. I’ve started to let myself poke at this feeling with cautious curiosity. Why, exactly, do I still care? One story I tell myself is about money.
A society concerned about birth rates should probably be worried that one of my first thoughts when I learn someone is having a third baby isPart of this is just the narcissism of small differences, considering that I enjoy a world-historical level of comfort by some measures. But it’s also true that, in the U.S.,, reversing previous trends, are now also the families most likely to have three children or more.
So yes, it’s partly class envy, even if I know better than to assume anything about anyone’s family economics and, frankly, make enough batshit financial decisions that I’d be lying if I said the only thing limiting my family size was the math; every day, people who have less money than I do have more kids and make it work.
So then the other story I tell myself is about temperament: I simply don’t have the right spirit to manage the tumult of a larger brood. This almost feels worse than the money part. Our society has made a push to associate large families — and let’s be very clear that it is onlylarge families — with competence, abundance, and joy.
I remind myself that this is partly to ensure that women have no time to themselves, and it’s a consolation, but there’s a little bit of coping in that consolation, too. I am fascinated by accounts on Reddit of people having, à la Natalie, a third child a decade or more after having their second. I imagine that doing this would contribute to one’s sense of the length and unpredictability of life.
These people areas if I were the kind of mother who could handle another child, even though I know, thanks to the COVID years, that I’m likely not? Wanting to feel like you can do it is, it goes without saying, a stupid reason to have a kid. I remember telling a friend who was appalled at my desire for a third that I craved a repeat of that big explosion of Technicolor feeling that came with a new baby.
This is also one reason that people do drugs, a much-maligned action, but one that does not bring another human being into existence. In the Instagram-inflected parlance of our time, multiple things can be true. I love my kids so much. Their childhood is slipping away, and that is a beautiful, bittersweet thing to watch.
My life is good; Natalie Portman looks great. We will never make a choice about our families that is not socially engineered in a thousand different ways, many of them fucked up. Our society is designed to enable and reward parenthood for some women and guarantees a thriving existence for basically no children. The work we do to fight these systems is reproductive labor even when there’s not a single baby in your house.
So, really, the question I need to ask myself is notYou'll receive the next newsletter in your inbox. New York
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