- When I decided it was time to become
a mom, I had no idea what birth would be like.
I didn't know how to change a diaper,
I didn't even really know how to hold a newborn.
What I did know, however, was that I wanted
enough kids to form a football team.
Before I explain how I went from wanting 11
to barely squeaking out two with my sanity
somewhat intact, I'd like to remind
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So, I wanted lots of kids.
Some would be scrawny and bony like I was as a kid,
and some would be tall and husky like
my kid's dad, it was gonna be amazing.
I would have so many kids to visit me
at Thanksgiving, I would never feel
like I didn't have enough love.
And if something happened to me,
there would always be someone to take care of me.
Or they could take turns, it's gonna be great.
Then I had my first son.
After three days of on and off labor
an unplanned trip to the hospital
and four days in the neonatal intensive care unit,
we started our life together.
He was a wonderful baby, he was always pleasant
as long as I constantly nursed him,
held him, and slept right next to him.
I loved my Velcro baby, as we call these kinds of babies.
But being constantly on-call was exhausting.
I also managed to write and edit
my doctoral thesis with this newborn.
So it was a lot.
My first born grew very fast on just my breast milk.
He tripled his birth weight within
the first year, and that's a lot
on a body that was still recovering from birth.
As my son's first year progressed,
he started to eat solids, and he even decided
he was gonna walk at 18 months.
He was just starting to babble and talk,
but he was still accustomed to being held
in the sling a lot.
He was still my baby even as we neared two years.
I finished grad school with a very attached toddler,
and got pregnant, and welcomed my little man
after three hours of labor, unattended, except for pushing.
I wrongfully assumed that baby number two
would be totally different than baby number one.
Labor was so different, pregnancy was so different,
he's gonna be a breeze.
Wrong, baby number two was a Velcro baby
who nursed a ton and was always pleasant
as long as I held him, nursed him,
and slept right next to him safely.
He tripled his birth weight within
the first year of his life, and I had
the first of what would be four hernia surgeries as a mom.
My first born still needed a lot
of cuddling and tenderness, even
after his brother was born.
He even tried nursing again.
It felt like I had two babies.
I cried a lot, I was stressed.
We had no nanny, we had no babysitter.
I was tutoring Hebrew and and piano at the time,
and I was sleeping in basically two to three-hour spurts.
And so, at 33 with a toddler and a baby
who still needed me tremendously,
I decided that I was done having babies.
I cried about it a lot, because I didn't want
to be done, I wanted to do the thing
that I set out to do, I wanted to do it right.
I wanted 11 children, why didn't God
give me the patience to have 11 children?
God, give me the patience to have 11 children!
I cried when I leafed through the pages
of Mothering Magazine and La Leche League International
Magazine, I saw women with five and six kids
with supportive, loving husbands who had endless patients.
They looked amazing, they felt great.
They got to do what I wanted to do.
Parenting is a constant struggle between holding
on and letting go, just like life.
It's a constant struggle between who you think you
are, and who you actually have the ability to be.
There is a lot of regret, and ultimately we hope
that there will be a lot of self-acceptance.
As a clinical perfectionist, I feel
like I failed at being the mom that I wanted to be.
I couldn't bring myself to have more children
when my boys still needed so much love and attention.
And also, my sanity was kind of questionable to begin with,
so all of this was a big challenge.
I always wondered what other children
of mind would look like.
I see, I see girls who kind of look
like I did at their age, and I wonder
if that's what my daughter would've looked like.
I wonder what DNA combinations were
in place for the children that I never had.
Would number three be kind of a clone of me,
like my first born is?
Or would they be a clone of their dad,
like my second-born kind of is?
Would we have a lefty, like my second son,
or would they be color-blind like my first son?
I wonder, and so it goes.
We do what we can the best we can.
We mourn loss, and we hold out hope
that acceptance will bring perspective.
And also, that everything is exactly how it should be.
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