I've Been Dreaming Of a Third Baby, Who Even Am I Now?

Earlier this week, I finally got around to donating three boxes of baby clothes. We all know we’re in the bleakest of midwinters and Little Village, a baby bank charity, is expecting 100 newborns to be arrive over the cold months without a safe place to sleep. It’s an absolute no-brainer—I have the full kit in boxes and my youngest turns two next month. Donating is the very, very least I can do. Emotionally, though, the process of folding and packing each of those babygros has had me in a chokehold. Not just because every piece of material is imbued with memories of my kids which I’ll never get back (I’m a sentimental old sausage), but also because if I’m honest, I’ve been holding on to things… just in case.

I always knew I wanted to be a mum, but absolutely believed I was a one-and-done parent. My eldest son came out with spurs burning and those first years suggested that I wasn’t dispositionally suited to motherhood. When an unplanned pregnancy led to losing our daughter five months later, my feelings changed. There was no question in both my body and mind that I was already a mother of two, and I desperately ached to be pregnant again. I went through a huge paradigm shift between my second and third pregnancies which marked a massive watershed in terms of my identity and general sense of my role in life.

As much as I bemoan many aspects of parenting (I prefer to describe it as ‘processing on the go’ 🤣), it is my grandest joyride. Not my only joy, by a long stretch, but on a soul level for me personally, nothing compares. This is despite the fact that there is still so much about motherhood which I’m physically and mentally incompatible with. My pregnancies are cautionary tales, my body reacts to breastfeeding in ways the books do not explain, and the pressure to play for hours makes me want to scream into a nursing pillow. On the other hand, I love reading to them, rubbing creams into their soft, oily skin, singing them lullabies to sleep…Even when my eldest, Grey, cringed from my touch (he’s fortunately had a change of tune), I adored him. Even when he tells me I’m the worst mother in London (verbatim), I still swoon at his laughter. While I’m not playful, I do have reserves of compassion and patience which have, it turns out, been very helpful with raising two boys masquerading as ping pong balls. There’s lots and lots I lack, but plenty to make up for it with. Five years in, I’ve accepted my shortcomings and found my groove and confidence. I hear they will need me more emotionally as they grow and as long as I don’t have to wipe their bums too often, I’m here for it.

The truth is…I would love another baby. Saying it out loud feels foolish because it isn’t going to happen, but for the past 18 months I’ve grappled with an overwhelming yearning to be pregnant again. No-one is more surprised about this development than me. Every single rational thought in my mind reminds me how ridiculous these feelings are, and my boyfriend does a regular recap of the real and indisputable impediments to a third. Firstly, we have a one in 20 chance of having a baby with the same genetic defect that our little girl had. This is no small issue; you wouldn’t wish that experience on your worst enemy and I don’t know if I could come back from it again. Next up are the other very common barriers: money, and the fact that both our careers are demanding, seeping well beyond any kind of 9-5. Sure, we have flexibility which is wonderful, but nothing comes for free, and we pay for it with bleeding, porous professional boundaries. Thirdly my other half feels entirely complete with his family and is drained dry—he can’t face another two years of the baby lifestyle. He thinks I’ve gone temporarily bonkers, that I’ve lost touch with the memory of what it’s actually like and am suffering from some kind of parental Stockholm Syndrome. His feeling is that we are hanging on by a thread and any other child is going to both materially and emotionally impact negatively on our two boys and our relationship. It would be, in his mind, like throwing a match into tinderbox. He’s not wrong on any of these counts and the fact he feels so certain should draw a line definitively under the conversation. I’m also 39, so the whole thing is probably moot anyway. Plus, let us not forget the environment.

And yet.

I lie awake at night imagining another baby in arms, imagining being pregnant and I know in my heart that I have the capacity to love at least another little boy or girl. I think about it often during the day too. I find myself, staring into my kids’ beautiful eyes and fantasising about another pair of chocolaty brown lashes and curls around the ear. I know exactly what children are like, both the good and they bad and I want to spend more of my life doing it. I am way, way broodier than I was in my early 30s.

This unexpected shift in aspiration has forced me to confront a bunch of beliefs I’d once held. In the past, I can only think that I was more judgemental than I am today—funny how life serves you up a lesson when you’re being an asshole. Back then, the choice to have three or more children, seemed to me to signal that a woman wasn’t particularly serious about her career (sorry, sorry I know). They must either be earth mothers, wealthy enough to not have to worry about either the impact on their career, able to rely on wraparound childcare, or else potentially insane. As I’m super serious about my job, clearly not earthy in any aspect, not married to a banker nor generally insane (*arguable), I’ve disproven to myself everything I imagined came hand in hand with a desire for three plus.

What I’ve learnt over the past 18 months is that the yearning isn’t a rational force. You can’t just reason yourself out of it. It’s like the origins of the moon or why we yawn. While I could sit here and list out every reason against further procreation, I can’t feel anything other than a near-constant longing. Perhaps reading this you are also thinking another thought which would have once gone through my mind too: you’ve already got two healthy children, you should be grateful for what you have. Stop being so greedy, wake up and smell your blessings. When I was struggling to get pregnant or after I’d lost our girl, I might have felt something like this too. But now I’ve gone through this emotional tussle, the idea of three, four or even five kids doesn’t seem like avarice. It feels like nature doing its thing in a way I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced in a corporal sense.

I can’t discount that this all may be the final rattle of my eggs, sending out crazed hormones in a last-ditch effort to fulfil my fertility. One friend suggested that it might also be coming to terms with being at the end of the fertility runway that’s driving the mothering urges. Perhaps, she suggested, there’s a reluctance to accept the new version of womanhood ahead, though I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything much different—beyond the baby making itself—on the other side. My mum remains as alluring as she approaches her seventh decade as she ever was and I have no fear of being invisible to men looking for a fertile prize, they’ve never paid me much attention anyway.

Seeing the desire for more children as an expression of privilege is of course, a modern mentality. The fact that we have the ability to exert control over our fertility means we can be seen as feckless or overprivileged, or most pertinently climate-disaster denying if we don’t. Once upon a time, fecundity was equated with piety and patriotism and we have to remember that our collective assessment on what is or isn’t an appropriate family size is subjective, and may very well change. What all these diktats fail to take into account is the power of the animal drive within. From recent personal experience, I can say that can be blinding. It can absolutely cloud nearly everything standing in its way and it’s a desire that every cell in your body is wired to generate. We all like to see ourselves as masters of our own nature and focus on the complexity of our decision making skills, but in this moment, I feel more mammalian than ever in my life, motivated so deeply by something I could never have imagined I would want.

You cant have half a baby. There’s no compromise to be had in this case, which is a hard pill to swallow when it comes to something so fundamental. I know amongst those of you reading, there will be several of you having very similar conversations with your partners and yourselves and that perhaps you feel guilty for the wrenching feelings you just can’t seem to swallow. As I work through it, I have realised that part of my desire is wrapped up in the fact that there was already another baby, who isn’t here with us now. That grief, now helixed into my being sharpens the edges of regret. But having another child is never going to fill that hole, it’s un-fillable even these years later and my hands full with two under five. I could have ten kids and I’d still catch my breath when I thought about my little girl lost to the trees and sky. I hope it’s evident that there is no any sympathy required, that this piece isn’t about that. Instead, it’s a reminder that you can truly change your mind on elemental issues and that none of us are anywhere near as fixed as we might like to think. It’s also to say that as we can be true strangers to our future selves, we’d best wear our belief systems lightly and withhold judgements—lest we end up pinning a scarlet letter to our own breasts.