Once a parent, twice a parent...

I've mentioned this before, but sometimes it seems like there's a hive mind among the blogs I visit. I've been mulling over this post for a few days, and then this question comes up in the daily Q&A over on WIM.

I always knew that parenthood was a life experience that I didn't want to miss. But not considering myself a "natural" at dealing with kids, and being of the opinion that it only requires one of them to make you a parent, I was pretty sure as early as high school that one child was all I wanted. After all, every firstborn started out as an only child. (As an aside, it occurs to me that comedian Bill Cosby - whose routines about family and parenthood are still timelessly hilarious - wouldn't agree with that opinion. He's mentioned that parents with just one child aren't "really" parents because they miss so much. Then again, this is someone who had five children, and "the reason (he and his wife) had five children is because (they) did not want six.")

I had no idea at the time that the one child would come along just two years after high school was over, though - and at 20, there's still plenty of time to change one's mind. There's also a lot more incentive to plan any subsequent children when the first one takes you by surprise, and we were keeping the door open. I'd had a very easy pregnancy, but 21 hours of labor had led to a C-section delivery, and it was pretty likely there would be a repeat procedure with another baby unless it was quite small. (I'm 4'8" tall, and I'd somehow delivered an 8 lb., 12 oz., 21-inch baby boy; the odds of a smaller second child were probably not very high, since firstborns are usually the smallest.) That was a potential deterrent to enlarging the family, but in any case, the subject came up for consideration over the years, but with decreasing frequency.

When my son was 19 months old, I reflected on the fact that when I was that age, my sister was born, and marveled at how my mom had managed two in diapers - not for me, thanks. When he was three, his dad and I had just finished college, I was starting work, his dad was starting grad school, and the boy was off to preschool - money, time, and space were all too tight. When he was seven, his dad finished grad school and we moved again - and that might have been a good time to consider adding to the family, but I remained unsure about going back to the beginning when we had one child becoming more independent every day. (One thing that did make me think about it more seriously was the fact that at that time, my mom's Alzheimer's was early-onsetting, and dealing with our parents long-distance gave me a special appreciation for my sister, which made me think about my son's possible future of handling his aging parents on his own - but I don't think that's necessarily a good reason to provide a sibling.) When he was 12, we got a puppy, and for me, that was a condensed short-course refresher on life with a baby - and pretty well sealed the deal that I didn't want to go back there. Also, this may just be one of my own particular quirks, but I do feel that once your kids are old enough to know how babies are made, there's an embarrassment factor for all concerned when/if Mom gets pregnant again, since I don't believe anyone ever really likes to think about their parents doing that, and this presents evidence of "that" which is pretty tough to ignore.

There was also the fact that "Mr. Only Child" seemed pretty content with life as it stood. The fact that he had young parents may have been part of that, but he rarely seemed lonely and was always very good about keeping himself occupied. His father - who over time no longer fully agreed with the "one is enough" idea, but accepted that as long as he was with me that was probably all he'd get (which is yet another story) - still considers it a bit of a disadvantage that our son really didn't have to learn much about sharing at home, but I've known plenty of people who grew up with siblings who aren't all that great at sharing themselves; in fact, it's almost the opposite, in that they're more likely to fight to hold whatever they have. A recent post by Liz Rizzo on BlogHer pointed me toward another blogger's recent discussions regarding being (and dating) an only child, and some of her reflections did sound like they could apply to the only child that I raised:

Alone is the norm. A childhood without siblings means alone is normal. Visits from friends are exceptions. The only child is also an outsider to the key relationship in his life: that of his parents. They are a couple; he is outside of the couple - the third wheel. As a result, most onlies are self-contained. We are comfortable with our company, and anybody else in our life is an addition, like pepperoni on pizza. Nice, but in no way necessary. While we crave emotional closeness, we’re terrified of losing control...We want closeness, but on our terms...There will always be this “inner self” you will never (and I do mean never) have access to. We withdraw not because we don’t like you, but because we need to recharge our batteries...Onlies are very socially mature because we were raised as “little adults.” (I think this was quite true of my son, who was often the only child in the room at dinners and other gatherings.) Often, people expect social maturity to correlate with emotional maturity. Not so. There is a breadth of familial experiences we didn’t have as children: competition for stuff/attention, physical scuffles, screaming matches, being silly, blaming others, teasing brothers/sisters, making up after a fight… (You can’t dump your sister the way you can a “best friend.”) ...(B)ecause of the intensity of our childhoods (being everything, the “center” etc.) we tend to see the world in black-and-white. Our sense of scale and perspective is distorted.

By the time my son was 18, his father was no longer my husband, and I was glad that there had only been one child to be affected by the divorce. At that point, I was also approaching 40 at a pretty fast clip, and my preference for having only one child strengthened into a non-negotiable certainty, but I was open to the prospect of someone else's children. If I were ever in a relationship again - which, granted, seemed like a very remote possibility for the first couple of years after my divorce - it would have to be with someone who either did not want children, or didn't want more than the ones he already had. Being divorced and realistic, I knew it was pretty likely that if I dated men in my own age range, there was a good chance they might be divorced fathers, and that wasn't a problem - but if they wanted to be fathers again, they'd be happier with someone else.

I found someone who was completely on the same page. His two children were born five years apart. Their mother had such bad "all-day" sickness during her first pregnancy that she'd joked that she wouldn't have another until their daughter learned to make her own sandwiches, and the timing of the second actually coincided with that. After their son was born, they agreed that this would be their last child, and my future second husband did his part to ensure that. And he has no desire to "un-ensure" it now, since he doesn't want to be over 60 with a child still in high school, so we're in agreement on the status quo.

I met his children when their father and I had been seeing each other for about six weeks, and have lived now with them part-time for almost two years (Tall Paul and I got married one year to the day after we moved in together). I've been careful not to step on parental toes, perhaps a bit too careful; I think it's wise to go slow in establishing the stepparent/child relationship, but it's only very recently that I've really started to feel comfortable behaving like a "mom" with the kids, especially my stepson. I am happy that my stepdaughter has referred to me as her "second mom" on numerous occasions, including the day after I married her father, but I always want it to be clear I'm not "the mom." We're in a co-parenting relationship with her, and that needs to run smoothly; everyone needs to understand that I'm not trying to displace her in any way. Also, my son has a stepmother too now, and as "the mom" in that context, I know what I consider to be appropriate conduct.

I think "Cos" would consider me a "real" parent now, since I'm catching up on things I missed the first time around, and the dynamics are different. That "breadth of familial experiences" mentioned above is certainly part of their lives, and therefore mine now, too. My stepkids are great and I love them - bright, funny, usually well-behaved - but they're kids, they're opposite-sex siblings, and as my stepdaughter approaches her teens (13 at the end of this month!) the five years between them seems more like 20 sometimes. Traveling in the car is a lot noisier than it was with one child, for one thing, particularly in a Honda Civic with a fairly small back seat. Mediating disagreements is called for several times a day, and although it's strongly discouraged, tattling and blaming happen. (One thing about living with an only child is that it's always clear who did it, whatever "it" was.) Interest in an object or a topic magically awakens in one child as soon as it's displayed by the other one. There are turf wars sometimes over games, treats, and parental attention; since we're a part-time-custody household, that last can be an especially tricky one around here, and the one I to which I try to be most sensitive. (I get their dad all to myself on the days the kids are with their mom, after all.) There's definitely twice as much patience required with two, and a need to teach and model it to them, along with sharing and fairness. But I think I'm at the right point in my life for handling the additional demands of multiple children, and I'm happy to have learned that - because once again, it's a life experience I wouldn't want to miss.

UPDATED to add a link to the article based on this post, which was published on 9/5/07.