Coming back for seconds.

My son is two and most of my mom friends have first-born children around the same age. Out of nowhere, an astonishing proportion (in my estimation) of them are pregnant again. I have been very clear with myself and my family that I don't want to raise any more children. This was a really easy decision for me to make, but now that my mama friends are having more babies, I have had confront some unexpected emotional challenges. I feel mostly embarrassed by these feelings, but on the off-chance that others have confronted similar feelings, maybe my own admissions will be helpful.

Quickly, though, before I continue, I want to be really clear that my feelings about having more children myself are in no way a reflection of how I feel about other people having more children. I have nothing but admiration for my friends who are going for more. There are days when I really miss the feeling of being pregnant, days when I wish I could give birth again, days when I wish I had a newborn hold and smell (divine!). I wish I could do it again. That's part of what makes this so hard:

The first feeling I came up again is loneliness- I will be the only one without multiple children of my own. I feel like I'm out of the club!
The second, related, feeling is fear of losing my friends; will we lose touch because we have different parenting challenges? Will I be able to relate to them?
The third feeling is self-doubt: Why don't I want more children? What is wrong with me?
Reflection upon these questions brings on a wave of emotion #4: guilt. There is something wrong with me. I am a bad mother and a bad woman for not wanting more; I am weak for not being able to handle motherhood; I am selfish for wanting something else in my life, for not wanting to sacrifice so much for so much of the time; I don't get the satisfaction from mothering that all my friends get, or that I am supposed to get. Do I not love my son enough? Why do I want something more than caring for him? Isn't this supposed to be the best thing I can do with my life? Bad mommy!

Let me back up a minute and explain how I got to the "No more for me, thanks!" decision, but not because I feel I need to defend my choice. Okay, maybe I do feel like I need to defend my choice. It's the guilt... First of all, I have a step-son already. He is 13, I have been in his life since he was six, and while I think we have a pretty good relationship now, it has been a difficult road for me to get there. So I'm a little tired. Second of all, 13 and two. Think about those phases of life. I get both at the same time. Let's just be understated and call that "challenging," shall we? If I were to add more to that mix, I would lose my mind.

That's straight-forward enough, but it isn't the whole story. So here's my secret: mothering is really hard work anyway, but I especially didn't handle the transition well. I didn't really mind giving up my job, but I lost a lot of other things too. I was the first of my friends to have a baby and after my son was born, we lost touch. I was busy with a newborn and they just couldn't relate. I couldn't relate to them either, and I had some resentment thrown in too. I had to create an entirely new circle of friends, which was not easy for me. As a result, I was extremely lonely and isolated for a long time. Relatedly, I gave up social interactions. No more nights out. I was breastfeeding a baby who demanding small helpings of milk on an hourly basis. He never would drink out of a bottle, so I just never left him for longer than he could go between feedings. No evenings at the theater, no movies, no drinks with friends.... I also gave up my extracurricular activities because of the nursing and because I had been scared by parenting literature which made me feel like my son would be damaged for life if he was left with anyone else for more than five minutes. So I wasn't going to the dance and yoga classes I had enjoyed before I got pregnant. I had no time to paint, or read, or do anything else for myself.

Moreoever, my husband didn't get any leave from work; he went back to work the day I went home from the hospital. I had some help from my mother and other adults, but no friends came to see me and I didn't have the support I needed to eat well, take a shower, take care of the house and also take care of the baby 'round the clock. I lost weight and felt badly about myself.

So I got depressed. Not just sad, but not psychotic either. I functioned and I took excellent care of my exquisite child, but I was a wreck in my head. I don't know if it would be classified as post-partem depression, because it seemed pretty clearly to be circumstantially-driven, not biological. It's not like everything was going swimmingly and I was overcome with inexplicable sadness. No, I could have explained it. But I didn't. It was so humiliating. I felt defeated, like I was a failure because I didn't find ceaseless joy in my new baby and my new role. All of my mom friends seemed to handle motherhood well enough and I didn't want them to know how pathetic I was and how deeply I was grieving the loss of my sense of identity. So I didn't talk about it. And of course that just made it harder, because I felt that much more alone in my sadness, and that much more alone in what I perceived as my own incompetence. I was really overwhelmed with the guilt, too, of knowing that I didn't just slip comfortably into my new role as a mother, that it wasn't just naturally easy, and that I didn't just relish it as the best thing I ever could have wanted to do.

And the truth is, I didn't grow up thinking very much about being a mother. I had dolls and I played house as a child, but I wasn't one of those girls who grew up dreaming about having a family. I babysat, but I didn't like most children very much. I didn't plan not to have children, but it wasn't on my list of things I wanted to do in my lifetime. Learning classical Indian dance and becoming fluent in Italian were on there, but not having children. It is obvious to everyone who knows me and my family that I could not possibly love my son more than I do. He is absolutely the apple of my eye and I adore him more than I though humanly possible. Yet I do not find ultimate personal fulfillment in the day to day life that I provide for him. I work as hard as I can to make sure I do right by him every day, in every way, from what he eats to how I discipline him. I am glad to see what a delightful person he is becoming, but it has come at a tremendous personal cost to me. And even though a lot of things have changed in my life since becoming a mother- more friends with children and a better support system are notable examples- the thought of giving up the fractions of personal time I have struggled to justify and use sends me into a panic.

So what's wrong with me? I don't know. I won't believe that I am a bad mommy, though I sometimes have to talk myself out of that one. I have a lovely family and I have to give myself a little credit for how well cared-for its members are. Maybe I don't have the stamina or the patience; maybe I am just too easily overwhelmed and exhausted; maybe it's that 13 and 2 are enough challenges for me; maybe it's all of the above, or maybe there is no answer. The story ends with me not having any more children. Actually, no, the story doesn't end there; it's just a chapter break. The life I need to create more of is mine.