The big decision

Well, Ben was a HUGE decision, and now we're facing a second big decision: whether to try to give him a sibling. At first I thought "Sure, we could do this again," and then I became pretty set on Ben being an only child, but now second thoughts are creeping again. I quiz every mom I can, and I even quiz kids when I can. "Hank - do you wish you had brothers and sisters?" In my usual fashion, I read as many books on the subject as I can find and scour the Internet. Various excerpts that have stuck with me as I've been reading:

"Visualize life with two. With one child you can hang on to your adult life. Two puts you firmly in the kiddie world. Expect dinners at the pizza restaurant, not the bistro. Prepare to double the sick days, but also double the fun, especially as your kids grow and play together." By Jennifer Bingham Hull, http://growingafamily.com/10tips.htm

"My parents had a similar realization, I think, when I left home to go to college, immediately got drunk, and fell down a tall staircase. "What if you had died?" my mother asked by phone when I explained why they would be getting an ambulance bill. They learned then, as I did later, that there is indeed a way for a triangle to suddenly collapse, and what is left when it does is nothing at all. My mother, contemplating this, wondered aloud, "Did we do something wrong?"
"No," I said, "You did everything right. I am sorry." I am sorry. I am sorry.
And so you see, I cannot take the risk. Like a farmer who needs children to till the soil and cannot risk having but one, so I need more than one child to lower my risk of absolute awful heartache.
To be honest, I do not know how this will work out. I, the only child, find it difficult to understand how love can be dispersed between two children. And there will be other shortages. There will be no perfect triangle. There will be alliances and counteralliances. There will be no short stories written near a fern. The stories that you write will be those you conspire out of nighttime conversation with Hodgmina. For, yes, you will live in an apartment, and you will have to share a room.
But you will be freer to fail, as your errors will be outshadowed by Hodgmina's and vice versa. And thus you will free yourselves of the unfair burden to avoid death at all costs. And maybe this is not entirely selfish. By having you, unnamed male child, I have chosen to give you both less so that at the end, as point by point of the shape of our family disappears, you will not have lost everything."
Hodgman, John. "A Letter to My Second Child." Only Child: Writer on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo. Ed. Siegel, Deborah and Uviller, Daphne. New York: Harmony Books, 2006. Pages 163-64.

"I've been thinking too much about this topic lately myself. I have one stunningly perfect child, age 2.5, and am idly waiting to get that "baby lust" feeling again. So far, despite the fact that almost everyone I know is pregnant again, no dice. I've always assumed that I would have a few children, but now I'm questioning the whole thing. There's so many things that come into play - my own memories of horrible sibling rivalry, financial questions, allocation of not just financial but emotional resources, etc. I just don't know. Greta is SO active and sensitive and high strung (a lot of things I'm reading on the X-treme Parenting thread are sounding distressingly familiar to me, and we are starting a round of developmental testing tomorrow) that I just don't know how I'd deal with another child. The mere thought of trying to nurse a tiny new baby for 45 minutes at a stretch while simultaneously trying to keep Greta from killing herself just boggles my mind. I know parents perform such feats all the time, and have for eons, but it scares me.
And in the meantime, while I'm spending months fretting about it, I'm getting older and older and my eggs are probably smelling sulfurous. Feh."
Erin -- Monday, September 02, 2002. http://www.theperfectworld.us/thread.php?id=341

I've been hearing alot of reassurance about the 2nd child on this network, and until now I haven't have the heart (or time) to inject my negativity, but I have to say I OFTEN regret having the second. She is sweet and easy and totally undeserving of an ambivalent mother, but I cannot help it. Two children are SO much more work. The 3 yr old wants to go outside when the 1 yr old needs a nap. When I nurse the 1 yr old, the 3 yr old leans out the window, or pours milk on the couch. They fight with each other constantly. The 1 yr old is always choking on the 3 yr old's small toys. But the real problem is that I get too depressed to even wake up in the morning. And this affects my relationship with my husband. If you are someone who needs solitude to replenish your energy, then at least wait until the first is 3 yrs before having the second. If your husband needs convincing, show him the very opinionated book by Burton White ("The First 3 Years") which almost says it is a mortal sin to space children closer than 3 yrs apart.
http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/parents/second.html

I am the 39-year-old mother of a 5-month-old baby, and my husband and I are torn about whether we should try to have a second child. (We are extremely happy with our delightful baby, and don't feel a compelling urge to have another one, but feel that in the long run it might be a good idea for all three of us -- and given my age, it's now or never.) There was a discussion here recently about what it was like to be an only child versus growing up with siblings -- but I'd be interested in hearing about the same issue from the *parents'* point of view (parents who had two children very close together, or parents who chose to have only a single child). Did promptly having a second baby convert your life from bliss to exhausted misery? How did you manage to take care of a newborn and a small toddler at the same time, and if you had the chance to do it again, would you? Did you hope you'd be giving your first child a lifelong companion, only to find they hated each other? Or did having the second child make everything even better? Or, if you had only a single child, do you feel life is better or worse for (a) yourself and (b) your child than if you'd had a second one? An odd topic on which to seek public advice, but . . . I'd love to hear about your experiences.
Responding to the 39 yo woman who was deciding about having another child. My answer is to say, you'll find out if it was the right thing to do years after the decision (whichever way you decide to go) is made. And whatever you decide, it will become the right decision.
http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/parents/second.html

I am 44, I have a 2 year old, she will be an only child, by choice. Both my husband and I come from 2 children families and we love our sibling to pieces but this is irrelevant as we must face reality. Our reality says that having a second child would completely destroy any semblance of sanity we have still managed to retain up to now; we cannot rationally "afford" to have a second child, and that decision is made for the good of all 3 of us. By having a second we would stretch ourselves way too thin mentally, emotionally, financially, physically and we know we would end up in pure misery. Annedoctal informations about how someone elses (?) childhood or adulthood turns out to be in absence of siblings, or the opposite, is not the base to make this decision or agonizing over it. Just be honest with yourself.
http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/parents/second.html

Perhaps I should not be the one to respond to this message, because I am the fourth of four children, and have three myself. BUT, I must say, I often look at only children and their parents with a sense of envy. My sister has an only child, and does so much with her! They read together all the time, go places together, and have a sort of closeness that I think is difficult to achieve when you are bathing one, dealing with another who has a cold, and trying to nurse the third! The other day, due to playdates and such, my husband and I found ourselves home with one child only, and both of us kept saying, "isn't this nice? Isn't this easy?" There is something wonderful about siblings, but there is also something wonderful about the quality and quantity of care that an only child receives. My sister has tried hard to create a close bond with her child and my eldest, since her daughter will never have siblings. This has worked very well. Their cousin-relationship is almost like a sibling one, and they will remain close as they grow older, just as siblings would. Also, as the fourth child, I can say from experience that no one ever helped me with my homework, enrolled me in extra activities (like they did for at least the first two), or seemed that involved with what I was doing or wanted to do. I don't feel any resentment, but I do joke with my eldest sister that I raised myself.
http://parents.berkeley.edu/advice/parents/second.html

So I decided that my Old Man and I could choose not to have another child without harming our son, that having a sibling would offer him certain experiences and advantages, but that not having siblings would offer him other experiences and advantages, and neither would be inherently more valuable than the other. Still, that didn’t settle the question of whether I wanted another child. O. brings me great happiness and satisfaction, and so I have an impulse to have another child, who might bring me similar joys. But O. also demands a great deal of me, limits my freedom, requires a baseline non-negotiable investment of time, energy, and material resources. Despite my only-child status, I grew up in a large extended family; a houseful of people with shared connections and history seems like a wonderful thing to me. At the same time, I not only value but need a certain amount of time alone. One child makes that time hard to come by. I worry that two would make it nearly impossible.
http://oralhygienequeen.blogspot.com/2007/01/big-decision.html (I could have written this post! It was written in January 2007 and her blog now says she has an infant daughter.)

Comments are VERY WELCOME!!