My last year of teaching, I had a student who loved to read astrological star charts. During finals weeks after exams, he read the star charts of most of the class, and when he’d finished with that, he asked me if I wanted a reading for my daughter—one year old at the time. I, of course, said yes. Together we hovered over his phone as he read through the location of stars in the sky and their meanings for her life.
“A Taurus!” he said to me, smiling. “A lot of personality, a lot of opinions, a strong person, deeply connected to the home, the family.” I smiled back. Already this sounded a lot like my kid at one year old, and I felt a fierce pride in my chest. He looked back at the chart and laughed, “Wow. A lot of earth signs here. It’s giving only child.” We both laughed. He moved on to tell Thalia about how her little brother wasn’t annoying because he was a Gemini, but I was still thinking at my desk—Would it be best if she was an only child?
Be reassured, I don’t make decisions strictly based on star charts, but Brandon and I have been thinking, considering, debating the number of kids we will have since Goose was born. It’s a decision of profound consequence, but I watch as people somehow seem to know or decide in ways that externally look almost casual—they just did. I am a little jealous of the certainty I see in family decisions around me—people just know with a conviction that makes them slightly irritated when I ask how they know. I am not very good at just doing—just knowing. I think. I wonder. I consider. I weigh decisions back and forth. I analyze. And then I do it all again.
Aside from jealousy around certainty, this process is not one I would wish away. The way I think defines me—it makes me who I am. I like that I’m curious and uncertain about the decisions I make—especially when they matter. I relish in talking them through, hearing perspectives, and considering the depth of what others have experienced. This curiosity and consideration makes life more real to me, and it’s necessary to how I function in the world. This curiosity has driven me to move to a foreign country, go skydiving, deeply analyze organizations in a Master’s program, and honestly, fall in love.
But my uncertainty without action can freeze me until decisions are made for me by time—especially when the stakes are high. I like considering the decision more than the making of it. I like possibilities more than decided outcomes.
I’m sure my student would say it’s because I’m a Libra—the sign of scales sometimes associated with flightiness and indecision—and he wouldn’t be wrong. But Libra is also the sign of justice—of fairness, rightness, balance—and those sentiments and foci have driven me my whole life. What would be fair to her? What is just for society? How many kids is right for me, my family, the world I know?
Brandon was born exactly on the cusp between Cancer and Leo, but he is much more water sign than fire until you back him into a corner. Cancers are known as care-takers: a crab with a thick shell but a soft interior ready to protect and cherish that which they hold dear. With memories as thick as their outer shells, Cancers are emotional strategists. They feel deeply and they are intentional about who they trust with their softest selves. Brandon is a nurturer, but the forgotten thing about nurturers is that to be their best selves, they also need to be nurtured.
Growing up years and miles apart, I think of Brandon and I connected through time. Both of us knew what it was to be nurtured. Both of of us knew what is was like to yearn for nurturing. And in nothing was this more evident than the relationships we both had with our siblings.
I have known what it is to have a nurturing sibling relationship. When I was young, I followed my sister around adoringly. Despite our six year age gap, we were remarkably close. My sister is an incredible photographer and artist, and we would create things on her bedroom floor on the weekends, listening to REM or Erykah Badu. She invited me along when her friends would walk to the corner store, fish at the park pier, or sit in the backyard drinking Arizona Iced Tea after softball practice. When my sister left for college, I cried for weeks—sneaking into her room to sleep in her bed, counting down the days until she would return for winter break.
I have also known what it is to have an estranged sibling relationship. I’ve known what it is to have my stomach empty out and my hands shake with fear around a sibling. When I got older, something happened—something broke—and I know deep inside that I will never not have that fear now. Once bitten, twice shy, as the saying goes. And love has the sharpest teeth.
I read the same argument again and again as I skim the Reddit thread on having children at 3 AM when I can’t manage to fall asleep again after strange dreams. The argument is that parents who have only children are depriving them of sibling relationships. The responses are a mudslide in response: people citing terrible relationships with siblings, people describing the best relationships of their lives with siblings, people that feel that they are generally neutral about their sibling like a mannequin that just happened to be raised with them. Other people become religious about the number of kids people should have.
More people go above the fray and say, do what feels best for you, not realizing that if people knew what that was, they would not be on a Reddit thread asking the question. It’s a nice luxury to know what is best for you when the systems and the structures in the country you live in seem hell bent on not giving you an option that doesn’t include at least an ounce of regret and a much healthier serving of hardship.
The thread continues, opinions, certainty, and anxiety abound. Have more kids and you’ll be stretched too thin—you’ll lose yourself. With more kids, that single kid won’t experience you in the same way with the same level of focus, concentration, and dedication. Have one kid and your kid will be lonely, sad, and isolated. I was an only kid, and I’d never do that to my child. And two lines later. I was an only kid, and it was a dream come true.
I read and read. And I keep thinking. Why the hell are we all so isolated in our little family pods? Why is any kid considered an only in this huge world with this large of a Reddit thread?
I do not want to raise my family apart from every other family, but it feels like an inevitability in the United States. It is the way policies and systems have been setup in our country, and it is what we have all accepted. I see the allure of it. You have the group you belong to. You come home and these are your people. You made them. They exist because of you. There’s a purpose. There’s a belonging. There’s an ownership.
And the more kids you have? The more gravity changes. I’ve watched as gravity has shifted for parents of more than one kid. You are pulled to your house, to your family, to your unit. You are pulled there, and you stay. As the gravity gets stronger, I’ve watched as the happiness of some people increases—you have your world, and it’s a beautiful thing to have two feet on the ground.
I know the three of us are closer to space-explorers. As an astronaut with Brandon and Goose, I come home to love them, and I fall into the stars again. They are a tether but not a force of nature. I can write in the backroom while Brandon takes a bath with her immersed in bubbles, laughter, and dinosaur eggs. I can go out for a drink with a friend on a Thursday and return to cuddle her while she watches Hotel Transylvania 2. Much of this interstellar travel is because I have Brandon as a partner—nearly all of it. But much of it is also about just having her, brave, bold, brilliant, beautiful Goose.
I love being a parent, and I love being myself. One of the posters on the Reddit thread calls this selfish, but after a year of postpartum depression, I’m not sure I can agree. Could I even have another kid if we wanted to? Would I be pulled into that darkness again? I hear the psychiatrist’s voice, “It is an assured likelihood that should you have another child, you will experience this again. More than 80% of people who have postpartum depression with the first child, have it again with the second.” Do I want to lose a year with my kid? I think as I look at her sweet honey eyes, the dimple that pops during a particularly committed smile.
But who is waiting on the other side? When I gave birth, I was certain there would be another time. I made a comment to Brandon right after about the next time we would do it. I feel a pull I cannot logically describe or understand. Is there someone waiting? I sometimes wonder.
I have never been more pro-choice than I am now. I do not believe in some inevitable responsibility or expectation to have children. I do not believe that lives begin at conception. I believe in the power and need for national abortion rights. But what I feel is something separate from all of it—legal, religious, or biological.
I read a poem by Sharon Olds decades ago that stays with me called “The Unborn”:
Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads,
Like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them…
And sometimes, like tonight, by some black
Second sight I can feel just one of them
Standing on the edge of a cliff by the sea
In the dark, stretching its arms out
Desperately to me.
An ardent and powerful feminist poet, Olds writes mostly about the pleasure and pain of bodies. And when I read her poem in my late teens, I recognized the yearning in it and the possibility. I find myself again in this Sharon Olds place decades later, seeing that glimmer she describes, wondering what it means, wondering who exists in that black second sight.
Brandon and I—as the youngest in our families—were the ones waiting on that other side. If there is another side. Maybe there’s just a long waiting line of consciousness that goes somewhere unspecified. Maybe it’s just happenstance of biology in a moment that we just come to be who we are singularly.
We cannot know, and I don’t pretend to, but I wonder all the same.
My best friend cried when she saw me after I had given birth. “You’re still you,” she told me between tears falling on a plate of pancakes. I knew exactly what she meant. I, too, had lost a closeness when friends became parents. I met people after they gave birth like strangers sometimes. I did not know why that transformation had passed over me. “I’m still me,” I said, dipping a forkful of pancake in syrup. “I’m still here.”
I wondered for months if it made me a bad parent. There is a pride that some people have in the rightness of their ease as parents. There are the cloying comparisons that we wade through, a stickiness to them we can’t shake, regardless of confidence or sense of self. Say it doesn’t impact and you’re lying through your teeth. It’s a lie as sweet as sugar, but it doesn’t settle into you like a real meal.
We are all alone and fighting for our lives as we drown each other as parents in the United States. And the thought of sinking deeper into the quicksand of this culture of capitalistic parenting makes me feel ill.
But what happens when you die? the Reddit thread asks insistently, as do people I ask in my daily life. She’ll be all alone. We are so concerned with this loneliness. It’s not just these parents deciding, but the kids they have that will carry this belief. Will those children ask my child if she is lonely? These assumptions are generational. And I can already hear my kid trying to defend, explain, shoulder the response of it’s just me.
No one ever asked me those questions, but I felt that way at times—lonely, isolated. Didn’t you? We want to safeguard our kids from any hurt, uncertainty, discomfort, but I’m not sure we can in the ways we think we do. And I’m not sure happy people can recreate their world in the next generation the way they think they can—one kid or many.
But what about climate change? Another response reads. Isn’t it irresponsible to have more than one—even to have just one—in this world that is falling apart in front of our eyes. And there’s not much that can be said. Do I save all our resources just for her to give her the best possible chance? Would having another give her some sort of support in climate catastrophe? Will having one less child doom the world a little less?
I read articles by climate scientists who are still having children even while outlining dire findings, urgent inevitabilities. Libra me can’t quite pinpoint what is right what is just what is fair about any of this. It is not an option to ignore it. And it is not an option to live with it so close to the skin. We have children in context, and we pretend away that context at our own peril. I had her knowing the world was burning. I had her in defiance and grief and guilt and hope. I had her and only her.
And still I wonder about another child—out of love, out of care, out of thin air. I wonder in these last years that I can wonder. I do this knowing that it is a gift to wonder at all.
This morning I wake up to laughter in the front room. Brandon serves pour over coffee, steamed milk in a teapot, sugar in a small glass cup, with three mugs on a silver platter from our wedding. We clink our mugs together, Goose with steamed milk and Brandon and I with coffee. Goose laughs with a tiny milk mustache at the cats as they try to steal a lick. “When I get older, I’ll be a kitty cat!” she exclaims.
The morning stretches long and full, curls around us soft and sweet.
This is to say, I do not have all the answers. But I do have one. And right now, one is enough.
Oof the conclusion has me in tears - the uncertainty and confusion and turmoil of it all is so openly shown. It feels fresh and raw. And yet that uncertainty is balanced by the absolute uncertainty in Goose and I just...adore it.
I'm so proud of you. Every day.