Guest Blogger: LibMama

This week, I have the pleasure of introducing my friend, Marlene, who posts here as "libmama." Marlene and I run into each other every few years, usually by accident, when I'm visiting Akron. She's a librarian and an Akronite, is married to a British man (Ian), and has two boys (Blaise and Lux). Her second pregnancy was kind of a nightmare. She has talked about it in the comments on this blog, and extensively on her Facebook page, but I don't want to re-hash a lot of the details. You get a good sense of it from her writing.

When I talked to her recently, I asked her to put together a blog post on this topic: "Why did you decide to have your second child, and after all the craziness, how does it feel now?" Here is her response:

It was never because Blaise was not enough (which Ian cruelly accused me of thinking). So I guess:

• Part of it was due to a strong emotional and biological desire to have a second one. My “baby” was getting older and I would cry when I had to put more of his smaller clothes into storage. He was developing his own personality and didn’t “need” me as much. For example, he would say: “mommy, I’m a big boy now, so I don’t need you to hold my hand anyway [while crossing the street].

• Part of it was due to my mother being an only child and hearing her stories of her lonely childhood – especially after her own mother died when mom was a young age. So I wanted to make sure Blaise would not be lonely if anything happened to Ian or me.

• Another (more shallow) part of it was because I wanted to see if it was possible because of my PCOS, and because mine would feel more like a “proper” family if I had more than one child.

• Finally, another (more arrogant) reason is because I think I’m a pretty good mom: I’m mature, responsible, have a decent job with benefits (including—for now!—college fee remission), and I am making a conscious effort not to make the same mistakes my parents did with me.

However, I certainly didn’t want my second baby to have a near life-threatening heart condition! So at first I was angry and thought it was completely unfair of God (before my recent conversion to atheism) to give me this extra worry after I went through so much grief to get this baby in the first place! The first month in the NICU was horrible, the next few months at home were rough and scary at times, but now I am happy. He is healthy, eats well, sleeps well, becoming independent, always smiling, giggling, crawling, beginning to walk, and even saying a few words. He is also SOOOO damn cute - and I’m not just saying that because he’s my son, but it’s also a fact which many others have confirmed! He’s no longer that mean, screaming, puking, poop machine that I thought (during a hallucination on a particularly awful sleepless night) was sent here by the devil to destroy me! ;p He is a proper little person now who is cultivating his own little personality, and he has now created a permanent niche in my heart that I cannot imagine life without him. When I leave work, pick them up from daycare, take them home and play with them on the living room floor, they are both so happy to see me. They fight for space in my lap. Blaise will show me his toys and drawings (now that he‘s learning to spell many of which say “I love mom” – more heart pangs!) and Lux crawls all over me, puts his head on my shoulder, and giggles when I bounce him on my knee. In my opinion, it is the most blissful feeling in the world! 

It took a little time for this to form, though. I will be honest and admit that I didn’t have an instant bond with either of my kids the very second they came out of the womb. I was confused, in pain, scared, emotional, hormonal, and generally couldn’t think straight. This made me feel like a cold and terrible person, so when I confided to a friend that I didn’t think I loved my newborn baby, she merely asked “would you die for him? Would you jump in front of a bus to save him?” Yes, of course. “Well then, you love him”. That gave me an instant sense of peace and clarity.