Baby lust

I have four children. Four is plenty. So why can't I stop thinking about having a fifth?

By Ayelet Waldman

Apr 11, 2005 | The young mother wanted to be in that bathroom even less than I did. She scuttled out, her whole body curved in a protective crouch around the tiny bundle hanging in a sling from her shoulders, her nose wrinkled against the malevolent stench of a poorly maintained public restroom. I was there with my two youngest children because there is an inverse correlation between the cleanliness of a bathroom and my 3-year-old daughter's need to move her bowels.

While Rosie was hovering over the grimy toilet seat and I was herding her younger brother around the stall, trying to keep him from touching anything (one of my grandmother's most important legacies is the idea that the only part of your body that should touch a public restroom is the soles of your shoes), I caught a last glimpse of the other mother rushing out the exit. She had that swollen, stunned look I remember so well from the first months after each of my children were born, when exhaustion seems far too benign a word to describe the extent of your fatigue, when it seems like every part of your body is leaking and sore, when you have trouble remembering why you wanted a baby to begin with. The only part of her baby that was visible outside of the cotton sling was a tuft of mouse-colored hair. I knew how soft that hair was, delicate filaments of spun sugar. I could remember the sensation of silken baby hair against my lips, of a small, warm skull resting in the palm of my hand, the pulse fluttering under my fingertips.

Watching her stumble away on shaky legs, I realized with an absolute and sickening certainty that I wanted another baby.

"Mommy, wipe me," Rosie said.

"Me poop too," Abe announced, pointing to his diaper.

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I have four children. Four is plenty. Four might be too many, if one is to accept the opinion of the people who pass me on the street and ask, horrified, "Are they all yours?" Personally, I think four is the perfect number of children for our particular family. Four is enough to create the frenzied cacophony that my husband and I find so joyful. Four is not too many to sit in rapt attention when it's time for the nightly chapter of "The Wizard of Oz" or "Twenty-One Balloons." Four is a gang that entertains and protects its members. Four fit comfortably in a minivan.

Four children is enough.

So why can't I stop thinking about another?

This may be nothing more than the most biological of urges. I recognize it; I've felt it before and I've seen it in my friends whether they're mothers of one child, of three, or of five. Abraham just turned 2. He walks, he has begun to put together simple sentences. He has even used the potty a few times. Even though we call him "the baby," he isn't one anymore, and perhaps my body is simply doing what evolution dictates; perhaps my uterus is sending a hormonal message to my brain as I watch him get ready to toddle off to preschool. OK, Mama, this one's browned, cool and ready to slice. It's time to get another bun in the oven.

But a person really mustn't be dictated to by her lady parts.

I turned 40 this year. I know many women who have happily had children well into their 40s, but I started this process younger than many of my contemporaries. At 29 years old, I was one of the first of my friends to have a baby. I remember touring the hospital in my eighth month, waddling through the labor and delivery suites in my red-and-white-striped Betsey Johnson minidress (the only time in my life I have ever worn horizontal stripes, because, well, why not?), staring at the other pregnant women on the tour. They looked so old to me, with their gray hair and their crow's feet. Almost a decade later, when I was big with Abraham, I could see the same look of pity on the faces of young pregnant women who bumped bellies with me.

My skin isn't the only part of me that's old. I pulled my back out twice last week, once, honorably, while lifting weights, and once, ridiculously, while turning on my bedside lamp. Perhaps this whole debate is just a pathetic clutching at youth. After all, wrinkled or not, if I'm toting around a newborn, then I'm young, right? But whatever the state of my skin and my muscles, my eggs aren't what they once were. We've already experienced the heartbreak of terminating one pregnancy due to a genetic abnormality. With four healthy children, I tell myself it would be irresponsible to give the dice another throw.

And yet.

And yet.

Never to feel the sandbag weight of a baby slung over my shoulder? Never to hold miniature, translucent starfish fingers in my hand? Never to match my breath to a baby's shallow wheeze?

I am carrying on such arguments in my head. I tell myself that after four children my belly is already so stretched and flabby that I have to do origami to get my pants buttoned. One more pregnancy and I'd be doomed to elastic waists for the rest of my life. I remind myself of what it would be like to confront the decision of going off the medications I take for my bipolar disorder. I remember the look on my good-natured obstetrician's face when she said, while checking how my Caesarean incision was healing, "Well, I'm not sure I really want to go back in there again." Ethel Kennedy reportedly had all 11 of her children via Caesarean section, but I can happily concede that record to her.

Other women in the park are having these same internal debates, I think. When a newborn shows up there's a pause, a hiccup in the general hubbub. We all stare, misty-eyed. We coo, we ooh. And then someone's kid whacks someone else's on the head with a shovel, or a toddler gets stuck on the top of the slide and gives a wrenching shriek, and we all briskly shake off that gentle longing.

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