He was an unplanned baby, a surprise amidst the early carefree months of marriage. I was terrified at the enormity of becoming a mother before I felt ‘ready’. As I packed my bag for hospital I remember holding up a tiny babygro to my swollen stomach in awe that it could hold a person to fill it. My superstition clipped my imagination, not daring to believe the good fortune that was now within reach. Must not get too attached, not yet. I primed myself for disappointment. When the day came and my stretched and taught tummy deflated like a punctured balloon my transition from girl to mother was smooth, textbook. The moment he was put in my arms, bloodied and battered from his entrance into the world I felt like I had already known him forever. He filled a space in me I hadn’t known existed.
Now, nearly four years later, as every month my body relentlessly empties itself of what it doesn’t hold inside, the miracle of him is even greater. We find ourselves standing stunted amongst the growing families of friends. Rebuffing the careless comments ‘wait till the next one’, ‘hurry up and have another one’, ‘sure you’ll want a girl next’. They ripple like salty waves from top to bottom, giving my heart a jolt like an electric shock. Our eyes will meet, a look to send silent comfort, his blue to my brown. We are in this together, my husband and I. The betrayal of our bodies’ inability to remake what they did so effortlessly before. There are painful tears and Doctors appointments as the years tick by. Our baby gone, existing only in the pictures dotted around the house, like colourful confetti, a reminder of happy times.
Our wonderful boy grows stronger and bigger with each passing day, the epicenter of our lives, the foot our compass world revolves around. I look at him and feel certain that I am the luckiest woman alive. He is both not enough and yet too much for me ever to have hoped for. How far do we go in our pursuit to give him a brother or a sister, at what risk and at what pain should it be pursued? I fit neatly book-ended between a brother and a sister, my husband is the youngest of five, to us family should never mean ‘only.’ People presume family size is a choice, it often is, but not always. One child is not our choice and some days it hurts to have to face the world. To visit the newly born and talk of nothingness, baring gifts of pink and blue, while my boy looks on giant- like beside the tiny bundle.
As he grows more independent the gap yawns between us, the invisible cord, from mother to son stretching, allowing him to carve his own life. He soldiers on strong and brave ready for his next battle in the ways of the world, my little hero, while I am left to grieve in his empty wake for what could have been. For the baby not strong enough for the whole journey in my womb, for the dreams that didn’t make it off the blueprints, for the lost chance to do it all again, better. ‘Oh just the one’ they say, like it’s a lack in our parental qualifications. They pity us or think us selfish. Well, they shouldn’t. Because we have everything in him.
