One More?

I dreamt I was pregnant again last night. It’s one of those dreams that pop up every now and then – usually when my husband lays his impossibly heavy arm across my stomach during the night.

As is usually the case, the dream pregnancy was a total shock and I therefore spent most of the dream counting how many beers and birth control pills I’d ingested in the preceding month…this is all laughable, of course, since it took us almost a year to get pregnant when we were actually trying.

Every mother, whether her child was born minutes or years ago, gets asked whether she’ll have more children. It’s a question that seems so innocent, but has come to seem intrusive to me…the way that it suggests that getting pregnant is such an easy task, that choosing to bring another person into the world is such a simple decision.

As anyone who has asked me the question in the last few years knows, my answer is a definitive “no.” However, I answer with such decisiveness out of practice more than some sense of knowing that our family is complete.

Before we had twins, we had always talked about having three kids (for the record, my husband was lobbying for seven). But after going through preterm labor, having tiny babies who spent their first three months of life in the hospital, surviving the exhaustion of raising two toddlers, and finding out that one of our precious boys has autism…well, two started to seem like a pretty good number. Not to mention that my husband has since declared us “done.”

If any medical professional could tell me that another pregnancy would even most likely result in another set of twins, end in preterm delivery, and/or produce another child with autism, I think I would feel more content with the decision not to have any more kids. I wouldn’t knowingly walk into any of those situations again.

But the doctors can’t really tell me anything definitively (including whether spending 3 ½ weeks on hospitalized bedrest actually made any difference). They just don’t know.

This all leaves me with lots of really good reasons not to have any more kids. And yet…I can’t help it, there’s a piece of me that still thinks about it. And it’s not that my boys aren’t enough, it’s just a feeling that there still might be room for one more. Maybe. Someday.

But then I think about the risks, about going back to sleepless nights, about potty training...and I feel sure again. “Nope, no more.” And so it stands. But if there’s one thing that becoming a mom has taught me, it’s never say never. And so I won't...just "probably not."