I don’t get it. My birth month message board is abuzz with people thinking they might be pregnant, ‘trying’ (I’ve always found the concept of ‘trying’ a bit odd) for a baby or planning to start trying in the near future. Why?
Aha! Smug mother of twins talking, I hear you cry. Well yes maybe but I can’t imagine anything worse than finding out I was pregnant again. Don’t get me wrong, I love my girls more than anything and they were very much wanted but I don’t feel a need to put any of us through another pregnancy and enlarge our family further.
We didn’t want a big family and really only thought about having one baby but clearly someone somewhere decided that we should have two. On a selfish level, I feel I’ve done my bit for the future of mankind. My body has done what it was primarily designed to do. I’ve got the stretchmarks to show for it.
I didn’t exactly enjoy being pregnant. The first 18 weeks were hellish, with exhaustion and sickness (without the morning prefix – mine had no concept of time), I was hospitalised with a kidney infection at 27 weeks and by 34 weeks I was huge, grumpy and uncomfortable. It was bad enough for dh and I to go through that without factoring in the two small people that this joyride produced. I don’t want to have to live on chocolate chip cookies and ice pops again, my staple diet for most of May and June last year. It may sound nice to just eat cookies for weeks on end but I promise you, it begins to get a bit monotonous after a while. As horrible as all this was, it could have been so much worse and I’m not prepared to find out how bad it could be.
The first six weeks with the babies weren’t exactly a picnic either. Recovering from major abdominal surgery, dealing with two tiny creatures who were booted out into the big wide world from the cosy confines of my stomach and weren’t exactly thrilled at the idea, tiredness, hormones, prolonged bleeding, broken sleep, complete loss of control, no routine and wondering whether dh and I would ever have a conversation that didn’t involve baby poo. It’s all a lot better now but there’s no way I was to go through it all again.
What process happens in the brain that makes people forget all this? There must be some mechanism that flushes all the bad memories out and makes a woman turn to her partner and say ‘I would really love to have another baby darling. I’m ovulating now so let’s put X to bed and put some Barry White on to get us in the mood’ and the partner to say ‘Wonderful idea honey. I loved it when you were really grumpy and huge. Let’s make another baby because I love getting up five times a night and you look so attractive with baby sick in your hair’.
I’m being really cynical here, I know and actually I really admire any couple that has a baby (or two, or three) and decides that they are strong enough physically and mentally to go through it all again, only this time with extra passengers. I just know that neither of us wants to go through the last year again and I honestly don’t think we’ll change our minds in the future.
Also, we naturally conceived twins first time and there’s a 1 in 67 chance of doing that. If we tried again there is a 1 in 12 chance of a second set of twins. Those are not the kind of odds that I fancy playing!