“There’s no heartbeat. The baby died,” my wife, Debbie, said on the phone, sobbing. This is how I found out about her first miscarriage. I hadn’t gone to the doctor’s appointment with her that time. It was her second pregnancy. She had sailed through the first one, and our son, Carter, then two-years-old, was happy and healthy. I didn’t need to go to every OB appointment this time. It was old hat, something only nervous, first-time dads do. I stood there in my kitchen, helpless. Now, an ultrasound technician, a stranger, was telling my wife she’d had a miscarriage, and all I could do for her is repeat, “I’m so sorry” into the phone.
The second time Debbie had a miscarriage, we were on vacation the following summer in Alaska for a friend’s wedding. She had gotten her period a few days early, and thought maybe the travel had thrown off her timing. By the time we got home a week later though, it still hadn’t stopped. To our surprise, the hormone tests confirmed that she most likely had a chemical pregnancy, and her body was now terminating it. We hadn’t even known she was pregnant, not that this made the news any easier to swallow.
While I was shaken by this second consecutive setback, Debbie was completely thrown for a loop. Nothing I could say or do helped. Normally, she was so pragmatic and unsentimental. She had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when she was nine-years-old, and had the perspective of someone who knew that life could deal her a crappy hand, and that there wasn’t much use for self-pity. The doctors told us what a common occurrence miscarriages were, almost one in eight pregnancies. We tried to use the morbid statistics as comfort, but Debbie’s characteristic stoicism only made matters worse because it started a vicious cycle of feeling depressed, then feeling angry at herself for being depressed. Her practical side, so useful all her life, wouldn’t let her feel that way about something she reasoned was all too common.
I felt more and more helpless, my usual remedy of putting things in perspective rendered ineffective. I managed to cope by reasoning that we were lucky to already have Carter, and that if we had gotten pregnant so easily three times, we could surely do it again. Debbie knew this too, but it didn’t make her feel any less sad and guilty. I couldn’t reassure her that it was okay to feel both.
***
After a break, and a few months of unsuccessful tries, Debbie is finally pregnant again. When she passed the 12-week mark, the doctors told us we were mostly out of the woods for risk of another miscarriage. While she’s still understandably nervous about the pregnancy, she’s back to normal in most regards. Now I’m the one wracked with guilt.
After the second miscarriage, I started to think about the very real possibility that we would only have one child. I had been staying at home with Carter since he was six weeks old, because it made the most sense for our family. I hated my job and wanted to become a writer; Debbie loved her career and had far greater earning potential. It was the best division of labor. And while I had enjoyed my time at home, I started thinking about the possibility of a new life once Carter went to school. I knew it only meant six or seven hours between drop-off and pick-up, but that seemed like such a vast expanse of freedom to me. I’d have more time to write. I could take phone calls for interviews without having to squeeze them in during naptime. I could eat my lunch sitting down. I could watch SportsCenter instead of Dora.
This wasn’t the first time I had such thoughts. I had always been ambivalent about having more than one kid, but I knew how much Debbie wanted another, and I conceded that it would be nice for Carter to have a sibling. I had assumed that when I volunteered to stay at home, it was a two-kid commitment, but now that contract was tantalizingly close to expiring early. I couldn’t help looking ahead to the next phase.
Ask me in person, and I’ll tell you all the right things: that I’m happy and excited about the new baby, that I can’t wait to find out if it’s a boy or a girl, that I want to experience all those baby firsts again. But the part I don’t tell the well-wishers is that I’m frustrated that it means that my new life of relative freedom is put off at least another five years. I feel guilty because instead of being happy that my wife can finally put the emotions of two miscarriages to rest, or excited for Carter to have a new brother or sister, I’m worried about having time for myself.
I know that this is in part a dilemma that stay-at-home mothers have had for generations: sacrifice vs. self. It doesn’t help that Debbie says she completely understands how I’m feeling, and that if I need to go back to work this time, she’s behind me 100%. Instead of cashing in her well-earned moral authority after what she’s been through, she’s worried about my happiness. “This stuff doesn’t make me mad,” she said when I told her how I felt. “But I think you wish it did.”
It also doesn’t help that Carter is three now, and that I tend to think of any child the same way, appearing in the delivery room as a fully-formed Tasmanian devil, stamping his feet and shouting, “No!” I forget that there was a time when having a baby wasn’t that much of an imposition on my daily routine; I’d plop him down in a bouncy chair next to my desk and continue on my way. The bottles and the diaper changes provided nice little coffee breaks.
And it doesn’t help that, intellectually, I know my daydreams about what I could accomplish if I didn’t have to stay home anymore are just that, a fantasy. If I had more hours in a day, I still probably wouldn’t get that much more done. I know my work habits all too well; I’d fill the extra time with idle internet surfing and procrastination. The reason I get things done now is because I know my time is limited, so I squeeze in a week’s worth of work into the few hours I can steal. Besides, the responsibilities don’t go away when your kids go off to school, they just shift around to different times of day. But those solid blocks of unscheduled time during the day looked so tempting, time not just to work more, but relax. Maybe the part I feel most guilty about is that I’m afraid I didn’t want another child because I’m lazy.
***
What do I say to that kid when he or she reads this someday? “Sorry, nothing personal. But you see, Daddy is a narcissist. He just needed some more ‘Me Time’.”
I know these feelings will largely disappear as soon as I hold that new baby in my hands, but eventually the guilt over ever feeling this way will bubble up inside like a shotgunned bottle of Enfamil. I’ve tried to compare my ambivalence to the apprehension I felt before Carter was born, but that was based on the simple fears of a first-time parent about how to take care of a newborn. This time, I know I’m more than qualified for the job, it’s just that I’m not looking forward to it. It’s about what I want to do this time, not about what I can do.
When your first child is born, you trade away the spontaneous freedoms of childless life for the rewards of family. The change can be overwhelming, but it’s tangible, a clear reallocation of time and responsibility. When your second child is born on schedule, this equation shifts again, but the balance still tilts in the same direction away from personal flexibility.
But when a second child replaces a fantasy, I’m learning that it’s much harder to let go. The fantasy’s value will always outstrip the alternatives, because its value is infinite by definition. When I started thinking that we might have just one child, my fantasy of not needing to stay at home full time was closer than I expected. Of course the alternative of five more years of the same routine with another child looks disappointing by comparison. You can’t compete with a fantasy, because it doesn’t play by the rules of real life. That’s what I tell myself to feel better, anyway.