Why am I so triggered by #twoundertwo?

On age gaps and choices that don’t feel like choices

Photo by Audri Van Gores on Unsplash

A few years ago, I watched a clip of a very famous woman telling a chat show host, as though it were the most charming anecdote in the world, that someone once said to her:

‘When you have one kid it’s a hobby ­– two children is parenting’.

Fuck you, I thought. Then, less certainly: What if they’re right?

I’m pretty well-adjusted when it comes to social media these days. I’m on there, but very much with my professional hat on. I post about my work, my book, this newsletter. And, OK fine, probably too many pictures of sheep and dahlias.

But, mostly, I try to get in, get out. Let it all wash over me.

Pregnancy announcements, birth announcements, glib parenting jokes…none of it has the same power it once did to ruin my day or send me tumbling down a shame-spiral of if-but-when-why-not-me.  

There’s just one thing. One thing that very often has me hitting the mute button. One thing that does funny, curdling things to my insides. And it’s this:

#twoundertwo

Two children under two years old. Why should it bother me so much?

It took me a while even to admit to myself that it did bother me. Initially, I tried to ignore what was provoked by posts tagged this way: feelings somewhere between dread and envy and insecurity.

The bottom of my stomach would drop an inch. My thoughts would jar, like a blown-open door banging against a wall. Self-assurance and belonging temporarily unlatched.

There are feelings I understand mixed in there. A certain sadness. (Happy for them, sad for me: rinse, repeat). A familiar yearning. It’s not unlike how I would feel, before I had my son, when I’d realise that someone had managed to have two (sometimes more) children since Dan and I had started trying for a baby, while we still had none, only almosts; ghosts; will-o-the-wisps.

Does it hurt, if I care to do the maths, that ‘the baby years’ for other people can be so much shorter a chapter? Undoubtedly. (Two under two! So efficient!)

And, sure, there’s a bit of frustration at the way #twoundertwo is sometimes wielded as a social media flex: the way we still fetishize women who have a lot of children (providing they do it the right way, look the right way, that is).

Quite probably, ‘two under two’ is a prism through which I’m filtering a lot of intellectual angst about mothers, productivity, family size. The throwaway remarks (like ‘two is really parenting’) that mean the ‘only’ in only child so often has to sound like an apology.

But there’s something else in there, too. And I think it’s because #twoundertwo comes with the whiplash of realising I made a choice, without really making it.

Because, the first time I noticed #twoundertwo under a social media post, I’d already missed the boat. I’d sailed well past a deadline I didn’t know had been set.

After such a difficult, circuitous route to have one child, followed by spending most of his babyhood in lockdown, the prospect of another baby felt impossible for a long time. My resilience was sapped. Being pregnant again, with the ever-present possibility of being suddenly not pregnant again, felt like an option that was unavailable to me.

If ‘two is parenting’ then what’s ‘two under two’?

Next-level parenting? God tier?

Elite ultra-marathon runner to my Couch 2 5k?

I think about this more than I should. Whenever I do, it’s always underscored by that very famous woman’s tinkling half-laugh.

Here’s a conversation I’ve had more than once. Or a version of it.

‘She’s having another one – two under two, can you imagine?’

‘Wow.’

‘I know, right?’

‘I can’t even.’

I can’t even. A stock response. And, somehow, no one ever hears what it really means when I say it.

There’s so much chatter around age gaps as a choice; mere personal preference.

‘3 great things no one tells you about two under two’.

‘Here’s why I love having a bigger age gap’.

Wait until the first is potty trained. Wait until they start school. Might as well get all the sleepless nights over and done with.   

The relative pros and cons of different age gaps are easy to find. Yet there are just as many ways that any age gap is a non-decision. An unspoken list of factors.

After all, two under two – as much as this should never be assumed – may not be intentional. In the UK, an estimated one in six pregnancies is unplanned. In the U.S. it’s more than one in three (41.6 per cent).

Equally, two under two could be the result of feeling the heavy hand of time on your shoulder; of feeling there is no option but to start trying again as soon as possible, because it took so long before.  

For others, an age gap is not so much a choice as a financial calculation: a question of waiting until the childcare becomes affordable.

For some, another child never arrives. Or they do, but after years stretched thin by loss after loss.

So, perhaps that’s what’s really bothering me, underneath the #sponsored posts for double buggies I am unlikely now to need: all the choices that don’t feel like choices at all.