As I lay in bed alone late one night, my 5 year old daughter sleeping soundly in her own room (she’ll be sleep walking in here soon), I begin to imagine what my postpartum time would have been like in the house we live in now. My daughter was born in Los Angeles, and we welcome her home to a small two bedroom apartment–a space that worked fine for two adults and one pug, but that suddenly swelled at the seams with the addition of another human, albeit a small one.
There was nowhere to escape to in that apartment, no yard, no space to breathe. If not for the dog needing her walks, I don’t know how often I would have made it outside those four walls. I would load the three of us up for walks–dog harnessed and leashed (dog poop bag tied to leash), baby fresh-diapered and snugged into whatever my favorite baby wrap was that week. Down the stairs we’d go, out the heavy gate, and into the neighborhood of monotonous apartment buildings and chemically treated lawns. We would blink our eyes at the bleary sun beaming off the white sidewalks, our eyes not yet adjusted from our journey out of the postpartum cave.
It was what we had. It was the best we could muster. The best I could do for them. I had to ignore the smog, ignore the fires burning in the hills above the city, hoping that we’d all be okay breathing in that ashy air. Our world was small, our car trips were as short as possible (she never liked her carseat), and I was barely hanging on. I needed to feel more space around me. I needed rooms to go to when everything was too much. I needed home.
And so I took us away from that city of sprawl, took us back to my origin story: the American South. Suddenly I could breathe again. Not to say that the second and even third year of her life weren’t hard, but I had many things I couldn’t access out West.
I had my family, my mom. I had short drives, big parking lots, easier living. We made a home, a real home with so many rooms! A home with a third acre of green all to ourselves. It isn’t a perfect life but it has allowed me space to find myself, allowed me to matter to myself again.
And this night in bed imagining what her first year would have been like if it took place here has me mourning a future child I will never create, one who will never wake me in the night hunting for a soft mouthful of breast, or run through the wet grass after my daughter and our new dog. I am certain of this choice to mother one human child, and yet I cannot help but picture what a baby would be like in this home. Where they would sleep, where we would put a changing table, how this addition would make this house swell at its edges, knowing there’s not enough room in our lives for another…
I grieve this baby I will never birth, never hold, and yet my capacity for returning to the postpartum time isn’t there. I hold for myself the dichotomy of desire and acceptance of what is. I allow myself to mourn and to feel the relief, the space, the delight of mothering one beautiful, intense child (who I wanted so very badly and who far exceeds my pre-mothering expectations).
I wonder, does anyone ever feel like the number of children they have is enough? Do we all have a secret desire for more opportunities to love someone so fiercely you would kill for their happiness?
