Mourning
admin September 25th, 2008
As an only child I’d always wondered why people had multiple children. Everything that you could experience with two or three you could more easily do with one. The egg hunts, the fairs, the forts, the apple picking, the cupcakes, competitions, childhood exploration, developmental milestones, and I love yous are all just as open to parents of singles as multiples. Admission to children’s events, as far as I know, don’t discriminate. Likewise I had seen how tired the parents of multiple children seemed. Always doing something for one or another, they never seemed to have any time for themselves. I had watched parents who had easily integrated one child into their family take on a look of chaos and fear with the addition of another. Why? I thought, why do it?
I still think that logically, one is a good number. I like still being able to believe that my husband and I will be able to do many of the things we enjoyed sans child as well as all those wonderful things that I am so looking forward to experiencing with my son. But I think I’m beginning to understand those parents. I’m beginning to imagine what kind of mix another genetic roulette spin might produce. Our son is so cute. What would his brother look like? What would our little girl look like? How would another child’s personality mirror his? What does he share with us and what is really, distinctly, his?
And there’s another thing people don’t tell you. They don’t warn you that you will have to fall in love with your child over and over again because the baby you hold in your arms this week is not the same one you fell in love with last week. “Take pictures!” they say “They grow so fast.” Great advice, yes, but incomplete. They don’t tell you that the baby in those pictures is a different person, one you will want to remember, one in a blink you will never see again, one that yes, you will mourn. Sure every morning your baby is lying in the place where you left him, but he is different, every time you wake him. Every morning, he is new.
So I think some people have another child to get to meet a baby like that again. They want to hold their child 1 week, 1 month, 1 year old again. They want to fall in love again with their baby, knowing now that as soon as they do they will have to mourn him and replace that love with what he has become.
Goodbye my newborn. Goodbye my one month old son. Goodbye my tiny scrawny little baby.
I loved you.