There was a narrow window of time between my IUD being ordered and Logan’s initial vasectomy consult where a third baby was a possibility. It was a tiny opening, but I could picture drawing back an arrow with one eye closed and watching it sail through the air and sink into its target.
I didn’t want to be pregnant again. I didn’t want to have a third c-section, I didn’t want to have to rock a small, hot body through another muggy Houston night, but also I found myself saying, first inside of my head and then out loud with my mouth to Logan who, shockingly, agreed—what’s one more? For him, it was socks. He was putting away laundry, matching the pink and the blue and the white, and it occurred to him that there would be no more tiny socks.
So yeah, maybe a third, and really, if we were going to have a third, that would make Clementine the middle child, an awful fate according to pop culture, so why not a fourth? Why not fill a whole house?
Except then Clementine hit the point in her development where she needed to be held at all times and screamed the instant that you took a step away from her and also, on a cellular level, needed to hit you in the face and grab your under-the-chin fat.
It’s so rare that being in bed together means anything at the end of a day with two children under two. Logan had returned from his vasectomy consult and said, “Oh, the doctor asked what we were doing for birth control now and I said condoms.” Condoms? I thought You lied about the fact that we were using birth control and the one you picked was condoms? Had I gotten pregnant one one of the rare nights that exhaustion didn’t send us into an immediate slumber, I would have thought of it as accidental, even though I knew what we were doing, even though we discussed it once. We will probably not get pregnant, but on the off chance we do, we’ll just have another baby. Idiots. Fools. Idiots.
But there was not another baby, and there won’t be. I made a silly tweet about having to take all of our baby clothes to Goodwill because I didn’t get accidentally knocked up like I was hoping but deleted it because it read maudlin. I am not maudlin; I’m glad to have the damn thing decided for me, just like I was glad when I found out I was four months pregnant with Bear after a summer of agonizing about whether or not to have any kids at all. I think there’s a universe where we have another kid. I think there’s a universe where we don’t have any kids at all. And I think we’re happy in all of them.