With seemingly everyone we know having children, or second children, and Simon getting close to his first birthday, people often ask if we're going to have another. After many, many discussions, we've decided that Simon will not have any siblings, or that's the plan at least.
We went back and forth on the issue quite a bit. Before we even got married, we were reasonably certain that we wanted at least one child. Given our ages at the time of our wedding, 39 for her and 35 for me, it seemed obvious that time was somewhat against us. Because we really had no idea about the state of our reproductive systems at the time, we were perfectly willing to adopt if our junk didn't work right, but after a couple of months, Simon was conceived.
Pregnancy was stressful for both of us. I think we both wanted to punch the next person who uttered the words "advanced maternal age." The many tests and ultrasounds looking for birth defects and odds of some other condition were soul crushing. If something was wrong, what would we do? After just a few months, we were reasonably certain that if we were to have a second child, we'd absolutely go the adoption route.
The discussion stayed in that mode for the remainder of Simon's bake time, and even his first month. One of the Microsoft benefits is partial reimbursement of expenses related to adoption (in the many thousands of dollars, I believe), so it was sounding like a good idea. And frankly, we liked the idea of adoption for a lot of reasons. Imagine giving a child the gift of a permanent family.
But in the last year, we started to look at things in the bigger picture, and it caused a lot of doubts. I think the realization of our own ages around the time of Simon's theoretical college graduation scared me the most. Diana will be 61, and I'll be nearly 58. Yikes. We really look forward to the adventure of parenting ahead of us, but at that time in our lives, hopefully we'll be looking forward to retirement. A second child pushes that empty nest age out even further.
Then there's just the issue of daily life with more than one child. Kids start out exhausting in terms of time, but as they get older, the difficulty shifts to the thousands of emotional and behavioral challenges ranging from discouraging bad behavior to teaching them to drive. Obviously parents do this with two or more kids all of the time, but especially given my neuroses around not screwing him up, I'm not sure I can do it. Diana also made the very strong point that when there are two, it's a lot harder to trade duty between parents. I give parents of multiple children all the credit in the world, because it looks hard.
So basically what it came down to is a desire to keep our own lives balanced, while creating an environment where Simon can develop, learn, make mistakes and prosper. We think that our chances of providing that are better if he's our only child.
There are certainly negatives, and we know that, and none are bigger than the fact that he'll never have a sibling relationship. But honestly that was the only driver in favor of a second child, and it didn't seem like enough. When I look at people I know, and kids I've coached, the only-children were not any more or less solid/screwed up relative to people at large. I'm sure there are studies around this, but anecdotally I'm not worried about it.
Is this an absolute and final decision? Of course not, but our level of certainty is pretty high. We have so much love in our little family unit, and we're very protective of it. Simon is the center of our lives, maybe to a fault, and even when he's challenging and getting us up at inconvenient times, we love spending time with him. Being a parent is fascinating and awesome. It's not a sacrifice to be a parent, but we're not sure we have the emotional bandwidth to be a parent to more than one.
No comments yet.