Maybe I don’t want another baby ‘enough’

On 'you'll get there' and the myth of maternal desire

Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

In the weeks after my fifth miscarriage earlier this year, there was a thought that kept bubbling up whenever anyone tried to talk to me about it.

‘I’m so sorry,’ they’d say.

‘It’s OK’, I’d go. If it was someone I knew would get it, I sometimes added: ‘Well, actually it isn’t OK – it’s shit, but you know what I mean’.

What I really wanted to say – to everyone – was: I’m done.

‘I’m done’ became hardest to ignore whenever anyone expressed some version of: ‘Keep going, you’ll get there’.

I’m done, I’m done, I’m done.

It’s rare that my inner monologue is so loud – or, indeed, so concise.  

It would pipe up whenever I passed a woman with a newborn and a thousand-yard stare. Or if I saw pairs of children. (It’s funny how, when you miscarry a sibling pregnancy, you start noticing pairs of children everywhere, guessing at their age gaps and then wondering about the story, if there is one, behind those age gaps.)

I’m SO done.

I don’t yet know if I really mean this, or if it’s just something my brain is telling me for dramatic effect – striving for emphatic in order to win the argument, perhaps.

As it happens, it’s not a decision I’m ready to make yet, either way. Dan and I agreed we would take our time this time, give ourselves space to just be and, in my case, recover physically.

It would also, I think, feel like a sort of cheat – to borrow a phrase from

Farrah Storr

in her recent piece on how to live a life without children – to declare myself done, in my late 30s, when technically there is still time to change my mind.

There are a lot of good, rational reasons to be done, though.

I’ve been pregnant six times now. It’s a number that starts to sound like it’s from a different era: an era when women were physically wrecked by repeated pregnancies they could do little to control. It’s a number that strays into territory that makes me worry about any unseen – largely un-studied – toll on my future health.

Did you know that cardiac output increases by 20 per cent as early as 8 weeks’ gestation? Or that levels of relaxin – the hormone that loosens up all your ligaments and joints during pregnancy – are highest during the first trimester?  Does this matter? It’s hard to know. Apart from morning sickness, the first trimester is largely treated as physically irrelevant.

I’ve already spent an extended amount of time – seven years – either trying to be pregnant, being pregnant, being recently unpregnant, or in the new-parent tunnel. All told, this most recent pregnancy has dominated about six months of this past year: from conception through to feeling physically well again.

While pregnant, I was too sick and tired to fully enjoy our family holiday this summer. Then, for about two months afterwards, I was too drained to do anything but keep the wheels turning: work, parenting, laundry, repeat.   

It is hard, therefore, not to feel like this lost pregnancy has stolen time; time from me, time from my son. Do I really want to repeat this? Is this how I want to feel for any more of his childhood? Is this fair on me…is it fair on him?

(Perhaps fair is the wrong word to use here. After all, nothing about the distribution of fertility, of pregnancies – of babies – in the world is very fair. The same people who want to force birth on those who don’t want it, often also oppose fertility science that would make parenthood possible for those who do want it.)

In the wake of this fifth loss, the things that have brought me most comfort have been getting reacquainted with my body and how I like to live in it, without fear, without over-thinking. I can go for a run. Drink a second coffee. I can plan to travel without recourse to where the nearest decent hospital or Early Pregnancy Unit might be. I can pour myself into writing, reading, and thinking without also having to contend with symptom-spotting, hormonal fatigue, nausea, or another high-stakes game of ‘guess what this bleeding means’?

It almost adds up to relief.

And yet…. I can’t help feeling that if I really am done, it will mean something about how much I wanted this in the first place. Given that I have the option of keeping going – which I’m aware not everybody who wants a child does – why wouldn’t I?

But there’s an unreasonable expectation masquerading in that question. Because what would, in fact, count as ‘enough’? How could you possibly quantify such a thing?

How much physical trauma is enough? How much money do I need to spend on unevidenced private treatments? Do I have to have considered surrogacy, adoption? Do I need to show receipts from yet another expensive therapist?  

Like a lot of women report after having children, I’m ready to pick up some of the pieces of my identity that were temporarily dislocated by motherhood.

If someone has two or three children over the space of, say, five years, no one questions their judgment of being done; of having had enough of pregnancy, of sharing their body, of physical sacrifice and discomfort, if not outright pain.  

But if someone has spent the equivalent period of time trying, but emerges with one child – or no children – we’re much less comfortable with the idea that they could, quite reasonably, call time on it. Instead, we urge people to keep going. We tell them miracle stories of one last-ditch round of treatment or of surprise conceptions post-40.   

Or we tell them to be grateful for the children they already have, as if it hadn’t already occurred to them what a piece of magic it was that convinced their body to perform that particular trick – a trick which may or may not be repeatable.

Maybe the problem is not me.
Maybe I want a baby a perfectly normal amount?

It’s a straight-up double standard. That is, a standard rarely imposed on fertile people: People who announce a second or third pregnancy are not told to be grateful for the child they already have. Few fertile people are asked about whether they should ‘just’ adopt.

But there’s also a deeper myth at play here about maternal desire and its ability to overcome all obstacles.

If you wanted a baby enough, you’d find the money. If you wanted it enough, you’d freeze your eggs. If you wanted it enough, you’d do it alone. If you wanted it enough, you’d give up your job. If you wanted enough, it wouldn’t matter.

‘You wanted this’ and ‘you chose this’ are frequently – still – flung back in the faces of women who try to articulate the ways that motherhood is hard or out of reach. Try to point out the ways that society does not support child-rearing and you risk being told ‘don’t have kids then, if you can’t afford them’.  

The idea that stopping trying is somehow ‘not wanting it enough’ comes from a particularly hoary, old patriarchal lie: convince people it’s about desire and choice and nothing has to be done to make it easier.

Just as with parenting and caregiving, society ignores the effort – the costs it doesn’t count – and makes it mean something about the limits of our love.

Here are the facts, as I see them: I want another baby. But I don’t know that I want one at the expense of everything else.

In other words, maybe I want it a perfectly normal amount. Most likely, I want it more than the average amount. Maybe, just maybe, the problem is not me, but our expectations of what women can and must endure in order to have what they want.