Relay: Life With Two

This month marks a year since I last set foot in Manhattan.

A lot has happened.

Last December, at seven months pregnant, the diagnosis of an “irritable uterus” rendered me unable to lift anything remotely heavy. A brisk walk, a gentle yoga class, even picking up my 2-year-old son, resulted in hours upon hours of painful contractions followed by more than a few panicked trips to the emergency room to make sure that I wasn’t going into early labor.

Needless to say, my movements became more restricted and solo trips into the city seemed absurd.

Flash forward to March, when our daughter, Violet, arrived during the last snowstorm of the season.

People often ask, when ostensibly making polite conversation, if we’re considering a third child. My response, followedby a long, uncomfortable pause, is “absolutely not.”

Two kids is no joke. With one kid, you can sort of fake it. Your body quickly adjusts to sleeping again. Your old life eventually comes back into focus, at least somewhat. But with two children, life seems altered irrevocably, and most days still seem a puzzle whose pieces I have yet to make fit.

My husband and I live in perpetual fear of illness. We’re essentially one bad head cold away from the whole thing falling apart.

I often wonder how people go about deciding exactly how many children to have. As the only child of my parents’ marriage, I reveled in the attention it afforded, but as the years wear on, I also feel the burden of it.

For my son, Theo, I wanted him to have the experience of growing up with a sibling close in age. It’s a wonderful thing to pick up the phone as an adult and reach someone who has the shared trauma of growing up in the same household. As parents, we obviously can’t dictate their degree of closeness, but it’s my hope that Theo and Violet will, at the very least, look after each other.

Shortly after our daughter’s arrival, a friend of my husband’s sent the following note: “I hope this finds you well. I know it finds you exhausted. The thing I miss terribly going from one child to two children was the nap. It was difficult to coordinate two nap schedules and as a consequence the Dad Nap was eliminated. The Dad Nap is an essential part of parenting and sadly with two dependent children, it is a very rare thing.”

My only amendment is the Mom Nap, which has similarly fallen by the wayside.

He ended the note by writing: “Remember, and I say this to truly comfort you, your next good sleep will be in your grave.”

Exhaustion aside, we’re still finding our rhythm among who, exactly, does which increasing number of domestic chores. To his credit, my husband nearly always pulls his weight and seems, for the most part, not to mind it.

Still, I keep having the same nightmare, in which something terrible has happened to me and my children no longer have clothes that fit or fingernails that have been trimmed (I buy their clothes and clip their nails).

My generation is a funny, in-between one. While it was never a question that I would have a career and work outside the home, the roadmap to getting there seems to work a bit differently for each mother I know. Despite being told to Lean In at all costs, we also haven’t figured out basic things like paid maternity leave and child care subsidies to ensure full workplace participation, but maybe that’s a separate conversation altogether.

Shortly after becoming a mother, an old therapist told me that I couldn’t accomplish everything I wanted to do at exactly the same time. Essentially, that if I wanted a big career while my son was still little, I needed to come to terms with the necessity of someone else raising him.

I’m recently back to working part time, but I’m still saying no to more assignments than I’m saying yes to, mostly because my plate feels overwhelmingly full. Having done this once before, I know these early years pass by in a flash and that the time spent with these little people feels like the best work I’ve ever done.

Finding that elusive thing called balance has proven tricky — since the target, well, it keeps shifting. A dear friend who lives in London and is also a mother of two young children, runs a nonprofit and recently departed on a weeklong trip to Africa.

For a month prior, she composed a detailed list of what was to be done each day — when extra pants needed to be packed in case of accidents at nursery school, which frozen meals could be reheated on which nights, and so on.

In all, six people were brought in — her husband, two grandmothers, one part-time nanny, one dog walker, and one housecleaner — to cover for her. By contrast, when her husband leaves town (he travels extensively on monthly business trips), he simply packs a bag and leaves town. A similar phenomenon exists in our household.

We obviously have a ways to go.

My dream is to wake up in Manhattan, childless for a few hours, and a morning filled with exactly nothing to do.

Amanda M. Fairbanks, a reporter for The Star, is recently back on the job after maternity leave.