I feel like an illegitimate mom because I have only one child.
I want to wear a sign around my neck that says, “If the first child hadn’t died and the second child hadn’t wrecked my body, I would have three children by now.”
Everyone wants to know where the rest of my children are. You're planning to have another, aren’t you? Surely soon you’ll have another. You may think just one is enough for now, but soon you’ll change your mind. You’ll want more.
I’ve got news for you, well-intending people: I’ve already changed my mind. I want more children. I want one or two or even three more! I’ve wanted a big family since I got married. I wanted to create the something I never had – a home where siblings know and love each other and grow up together, with their parents.
But God didn’t give me that dream. He gave me two children – the first died and the birth of the second made it all but impossible for me to have another without giving up significant personal mobility afterward.
So here I am, age 36, with a husband and just one child.
And I feel like I’m not allowed to call the three of us a family. Because a family has parents and children, not child.
It hurts on so many levels.
I feel increasingly excluded from the conversations and experiences of my peers. I feel like I’m not allowed to talk about how tiring it is to be a parent, or how much my toddler drives me insane and makes it difficult to get anywhere on time because I only have one to deal with.
I live with a constant gaping wound where my son should be. Every holiday, every new experience, he’s missing from us.
I feel guilty that I can’t give my daughter a sibling. She’s so lonely, so out of sorts having to bear the full attention of two parents. She has two baby dolls that are “sisters” and she lives vicariously through them. It’s so unbearably sad.
I feel angry that my body stopped working. I feel jealous that it’s so easy for my friends to be pregnant and pop out babies. Why isn’t my body strong enough?! Why did it break?
I feel dis-empowered. I want more children but there’s nothing I can do to make that happen. I can't work for it, I can't buy it or bargain for it. I have to accept a fate I don’t understand, a fate that seems so random, a fate unexplained.
I feel regret that I didn’t marry younger – maybe younger me would have been able to bear pregnancy, would have been strong enough to save my first and not be destroyed by my second.
I feel like time is always slipping away. Every sweet moment with my daughter, every clever thing she says, every quirky thing she does, every snuggle in bed, every time she cries and wraps her arms around my neck – every time I think, “This may be the last moment.” Soon, she will grow out of her lisp and “yips” will become “lips” forever. Soon, she will be too smart for me, too cool for me, too old to snuggle in bed. Every stage of her growing up is a fleeting wisp I will never get to experience again because there will be no more children.
She has become not my second child, but my only. Eliana my Only.
And I feel afraid. Afraid I will crush her with the weight of my love and my desire to be a family.
How do I raise an Only?
While everyone else is talking about the challenges of being outnumbered by their children or navigating their kids’ rivalries and conflicts, I’m trying to figure out how to raise an Only. She’s outnumbered by us – how does that make her feel? She doesn’t have anyone to play with or fight with – how will that impact her ability to share, to stand up for herself, to lose, to forgive?
It’s not as easy as it looks, having just one child. Always trying to evade or justify a decision I didn’t make.
Don't get me wrong, I’m grateful beyond measure to have a child. I know sweet friends who weren’t given even that. But today, it just hurts.