You’re welcome to have another child, it just won’t be with me. – Charlie
———————————
After everything we went through to start our family six years ago, it feels a little crazy to be even in a position to write this post, but here we are! When my husband’s little sister died back in March of 2014 when Harvey was just two months old, my husband was 100% on board for us to try to have a 3rd baby someday. Over the past year and a half, that has slowly changed. Now whenever I bring up the idea of removing my IUD and at least not preventing the possibility of another baby, he alternately laughs or groans and says the statement above. *sigh* My head and my heart are so conflicted.
———————————
At the beginning of 2015, Keanne shared a link to this story –> With a Heart Wide Open
I read it…and I bawled. Go read it now, and then come back here!
Before Charlie and I got married, the biggest life decision we would argue about was the number of kids we wanted to have someday. I always said 4 (I come from a family of 5 kids) and he always said 3. After all of our TTC issues, we were stoked to even have Stella and weren’t sure we were even willing to go through the heartache of TTC/IF again to even try for a second baby. Then the conception of Mr. Harvey happened so easily, and we were beyond thrilled that Stella wouldn’t be an only child. All of a sudden having 3 children didn’t seem so impossible, except for the normal reasons (space, time, money, etc).
As a caveat – of course I know that just because we didn’t have issues conceiving Harvey it doesn’t mean it’d be easy to bring a third child into this world. Allow me to hang out in my dreamland for a bit though, m’kay?
At any rate, I don’t like being pregnant. I REALLY don’t like being pregnant. Puking all day every day through 17 weeks with Harvey was freaking horrible, and I’m petrified of trying to parent two kids and feeling like that again. However, pregnancy is a blip on the road of life when it comes right down to it, and I love birth and I love the newborn stage, so if I have to be pregnant to get to do all of that again and add another child to our family, so be it. I really want another baby; I really want a bigger family.
Then Keanna shared a link to this story –> I called him pathetic, he accused me of ruining his life: What children did to our marriage
Um, yeah.
I guess I’m thinking about this again this week because I have my period again. My period came back at 15 months postpartum after Stella, and that very next cycle was when we conceived Harvey. It was a 51d cycle, but somehow a CD37 ovulation still resulted in our little man. After Harvey was born, my cycle came back at 13 months postpartum (still nursing, just like I was with Stella). There’s definitely a part of me that is worried we missed our fertile window with that first 43 day cycle. Thanks to PCOS, my cycles are all over the board again, just like before. I haven’t been tracking temps or anything, but just from cycle lengths I know that my body is still good and fucked up.
- February 2015 – 43 days
- March 2015 – 60 days
- May 2015 – 33 days
- June 2015 – 19 days (WTF?)
- July 2015 – 38 days
- August 2015… started on Saturday
Then I write all that out and think, “Does it even matter that my body is still screwed up?” About 80% of the time, my husband is pretty clear that he doesn’t want to try for a 3rd child. It’s the 20% of the time that we’re talking about the loss of his sister and how he couldn’t have imagined going through that without his brother at his side that he is more open to the idea of a 3rd… but is that enough? I really don’t want to regret not trying for the big family I always wanted, but I also don’t want to have my husband resent me for forcing him into a larger family than he now envisions for himself either. 🙁
How about you? Were you on the same page as your significant other about family size? Did your ideal number of kids change as your family actually grew? How did you come to an agreement about when your family was complete? Do you regret the agreement you came to, or are you at peace about it?