Nov
24

Readers’ Choice #6: : To Breed or Not to Breed.

Penny asked:
“Is it too soon to talk about the possibility of another child? Or deciding that another child is definitely NOT in the equation?”

And Aimee had a similar question:
“I’m curious if you guys open to another cycle? I was wondering if after all you have been through with Ames and Simone if you would try again or are you content with the way things are now?”

Long ago, when we were young(er) and foolish(er), Scott and I decided we’d have two children. Frankly, I always thought I wouldn’t mind having a passel of them running around the house, but we settled on two, in the highly theoretical fashion of infertile couples—much in the way a broke college student might settle on preferring a Jaguar over a BMW.
We got pregnant with Ames and Simone, a boy and a girl, and just like that, our family was complete.

My pregnancy with the twins was hard, even before things went rocketing downhill. I threw up until I delivered, despite popping Zofran and Unisom and waking myself up at 4 every morning to eat saltines and drink milk. I was in pain from the beginning of the second trimester due to some horrible malfunction in my pelvis and hip that would sometimes rob me of my ability to lift my right leg, and later morphed into the sciatica that has plagued me ever since.
Pregnancy was emotionally difficult as well: a few weeks before The Bad Ultrasound I started having intense panic attacks and crying jags (in retrospect, I wonder whether Ames’ placenta wasn’t already failing, causing some sort of hormonal drop). I spent the first trimester terrified of miscarriage and the rest of the time before we lost Ames worried about pre-term labor, and AFTER Ames died I woke up every morning and waited tensely to feel Simone kick, waiting to see if she had died too.
The point of this litany of complaints is that while I was always grateful to be pregnant (and some parts of pregnancy I relished), I must have said a dozen times how GLAD I was that we had our two babies and were finished with the exhausting business of reproduction. There were moments when I thought a third, someday, might not be so bad, but there were many more moments when I honestly couldn’t imagine going through the sickness and pain and anxiety a second time. Even though I had never particularly wanted twins before getting pregnant, I was so relieved to have my two children safely created and boxing away inside me.

Of course, we all know how THAT turned out.

After Simone was born, after the weeks in the hospital and the bedrest and everything else, I was certain I never, ever wanted to be pregnant again. I couldn’t so much as think of pregnancy without feeling ill, and I had to throw away everything that reminded me of it. Pregnant women looked like waddling, ticking time bombs to me. I remember reading a parenting magazine in the NICU lounge, and turning the page to find a picture of a fetus in its amniotic sac and a column of pregnancy facts. I went cold all over.

It has been nine months since all of that, and I have a happy, healthy daughter sleeping down the hall. While I still believe pregnancy is like crossing a landmine-strewn field on a malfunctioning electric pogostick, I no longer feel ambivalent about the idea of another child. We want one.

But not now. I would like Simone to have me all to herself for awhile, and part of me selfishly wants to stretch my child-raising years as long as possible. Incidentally, even though there is no real “planning” of sibling spacing involved when you have fertility issues, I’m always interested in hearing from people about how they think the spacing between their children has worked out. Right now, we’re thinking of trying again in four years, give or take.

However, Aimee asked whether we plan to try again, “or are [we] content with the way things are now” and the answer, truly, is “both.” Deciding to try again is one thing, deciding how far we’d go is something else entirely. We intend to try on our own, at least, though none of my unassisted pregnancies have lasted beyond seven weeks. If we don’t get pregnant, or a pregnancy goes awry, would we persist? I don’t know. I am not at particular risk for another preterm birth, as Simone’s early birth was entirely a result of Ames’ death, but I could get an infection again, and while I am fairly certain I can handle another early miscarriage, another stillbirth would be too much for me.

(Well, that’s not true. I always hated it when people said things like that when Simone was in the hospital. “I could never handle that,” they’d say. They meant well, but it made it sound as if they loved their children too much to bear seeing them in the hospital, whereas for me, being a callous sort, it was easier. It’s not like there is an option other than “handling it.” Believe it or not, it is very rare for a person to spontaneously combust from grief during a difficult situation. You get up, you make it through the day, time marches grimly on. Much like this post. So let’s abruptly end it here, shall we?)

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |