Just One Child

It’s rare that someone asks to remain anonymous when I share their list. Its such a telling sign of just how brave the person has been in writing a list which is clearly so personal and raw.

This one is a prime example of that, where the author shares her experience of deciding to have ‘Just One Child’:

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My daughter’s birth was the conclusion of many years of heartbreak, bravery and emotion for my husband and me.  First, we faced down an incurable, terminal genetic illness when my husband bravely took a genetic test to find out that he would not inherit the disease that had killed his father, and that he would also not pass on any risk to any future children.  We then, having thought we’d faced our great trial to have children, found the months of trying pass by and slowly realised we would need outside help to make the children we’d been fighting for a reality. Four years and one very fortunate round of IVF later, we held a tiny bundle in our arms and couldn’t believe our luck. Our prayers of “just one, please just give us one happy healthy baby” had finally been answered.

After the newborn fog had lifted, I discovered a couple of things;

• First, my daughter was the most amazing person I’d ever met. She was and remains, beautiful, charming, calm, loving, sparky and very cheeky. She is also everything I ever wanted to be and I felt my main job as her mother was to help her keep her happy personality as she grows up.

• Second, I had made the most wonderful group of mum friends. I’d somehow found an NCT group who all immediately clicked. There was not and never has been any competition, judgement or negativity. I feel I’ve got great individual friendships with each of them and the group as a whole is an enormous source of strength. We have been there for each other through sleepless nights, feeding dramas, terrible midwifes, and much more. All with different approaches, backgrounds and expectations of our lives as parents, it just worked from day one.

• When maternity leave came to a close, I threw myself into a new job and so was surprised when first one friend, then another, then another, turned up at our regular nights out sheepishly ordering lemonade, and then announcing a second pregnancy.

• It just hadn’t occurred to me that while having one baby for me was the end of a huge battle against the odds and a once in a lifetime experience, for others it was phase 1 of a bigger plan to build a family.

• As these new bundles of joy arrived in our lives, and our ranks began to swell, a new version of the infertility conflict of joy, envy and sadness crept up on me.

• For my friends, I feel real joy for and awe at anyone who decides to have more children. My daughter has always been very easy going, but we still feel thoroughly beaten a lot of the time, so anyone who takes a bad sleep situation and throws another baby into the mix has my upmost respect.

• Similarly, anyone who can keep their head while getting more than one child out of bed, breakfasted and out of the house in the morning is a much more zen being than I am.

• I sometimes see my friends struggle to attend to two, three or four children, or to deal with squabbles, or rivalries and I breathe a sigh of relief. I know myself well enough to know that the big family world of happy chaos is not one I would thrive in.

• I see the need for bigger houses, bigger cars, more ruinously expensive childcare, and I feel grateful for my straightforward little triangle.

• But at the same time, I would like to have made a choice.  While we could, theoretically, embark on more IVF to have more children, the already low odds are far more stacked against us now with the passing years.  I also don’t want to let myself fall into a mindset of “just seeing what happens…” because I know that the chances of anything happening are very, very low, and I would quickly find myself back in the heartache and misery of wanting something that isn’t going to happen. It feels better, kinder and healthier to say no, this is it, and this is wonderful.

• And it really is wonderful. Our daughter brings so much joy and happiness. I don’t feel anything is lacking from my life, but I wonder what I am denying her life in not giving her siblings.

• Before, I always assumed I would have more than one and imagined the jumble of family games, fights and jokes that characterised my childhood. It wasn’t all plain sailing, and my sisters and I have thrown enough slings and arrows at each other over the years, but then I remember one sister telling me she was only coping with my parents’ divorce because I was, or another ringing me for a long heart to heart and at the end saying “I’m so glad I have a sister”.

• At the same time, an only child will never have the labels that siblings have; the loud one, the naughty one, the quiet one.  In our family, I am very much the eldest; responsible, anxious, law abiding. The others are more creative, risk taking and adventurous.  While this is us, these are also labels that stuck to us from an early age. My daughter on the other hand will only ever be herself, and the character of our family will be shaped by her personality, her likes and dislikes, far more than the other way around.

• There’s no right answer of course, and no correct path or way to feel about it. I’m so lucky to have my family, and I’m just as lucky to have wonderful friends, who mean so much more to me than their fertility track record compared to mine, and all our paths happen to be different. And most days I remember that.