My kind and caring doctor carefully explained my options to me. Although I had my daughter, Evie, fairly quickly when I was 35, having a second baby didn’t turn out to be so easy.
By then, at the age of 39, he had already been trying without success for almost a year. The reason? It turned out that my fertility had plummeted.
“We can get her pregnant,” the doctor assured me. “But not naturally.”
When he broached the topic of IVF treatment, an unexpected feeling came over me. Relief. Because, honestly, I had already mentally withdrawn from the conversation. The moment he told me that my uterus had shown its own “shut down” signal, I made a decision.
Jo Elvin had her daughter Evie at 35 and says she felt with every fiber of her that having a healthy child was the story of her life.
Yes, I had booked the appointment with a view to giving our daughter a sibling, something everyone around me seemed adamant I should do.
But at that moment, I felt with every fiber of me that having a healthy child was the story of my life, and I was happy with that.
Dress it as “destiny” or just call it “aging”; Either way, the decision was out of my hands and I was at peace with it.
What I didn’t foresee, however, was that many other people would not be at peace with this. You are welcome. Throughout Evie’s childhood (she is almost 19 now), I was regularly challenged with judgment-laden questions and truly outrageous sweeping statements about my one and only self.
There was a colleague who told me that a child “is not a suitable family”; another who declared that having a child was “a form of child abuse.”
There were also endless questions about whether we would have more children or, more surprisingly, ‘Why do you only have one?’ and ‘Couldn’t you have more?’
For all anyone knew, she could have been dealing with the pain of multiple miscarriages or a serious illness. I wasn’t, but that still doesn’t mean these questions and judgments are correct.
‘Why do you only have one son?’ As if my daughter’s existence isn’t valid until we have another human in the house? The audacity.
Some of these comments made me reel from time to time. Was it wrong to have only one child?
I thought about my own childhood. I have two brothers and a sister and I love them, but we’re not exactly The Waltons. We get on very well (my sister came from Brisbane just last month), but we are wildly different and not particularly intertwined in each other’s lives.
When my husband Ross and I met in our 20s, we both saw children (one or two, but I hadn’t set a number on it) in our future.
But since we were both focused on our journalism careers, we were in no hurry. In fact, we hesitated until we were in our 30s, when we realized we should possibly move on.
When we first decided to try it with our daughter, I remember Ross joking a lot about all the “practice” we would need to put into playing. But it only took four months to conceive Evie; Instead, poor Ross spent many months where I was nauseous, migraine, bloated, gas, and in no mood to even hold my hand.
We fought more then than at any other time in our marriage. Pregnancy was not the euphoric wonderland that had been described to me in those infuriatingly fake baby magazines.
One night, when I was about six months pregnant and stuck on the couch, Ross went out with entertaining people who weren’t pregnant, and I cried horribly while watching ET. . . like tormented sobs, like ET was real and he was my dog or something.
But we got through it. I was excited to meet my daughter. So I drank Gaviscon, ate the 24-hour nausea with white bread and Marmite, and slept every free second I could, because when I slept I didn’t feel uncomfortable or bother Ross.
Of course, it was all worth it. The moment Evie was taken out of me, via emergency C-section, the feeling of discomfort and heartburn disappeared.
But, like all new mothers, I had a challenging few weeks ahead.
She needed medication for alarmingly high blood pressure caused by gestational hypertension. Add to that the lack of sleep and the ever-present anxiety that I was doing everything wrong.
Because she is crying? I’ve fed her, I’ve changed her, I’ve taken her breath away, she’s slept, I’ve done it all over again and she still won’t stop crying.
She hates me? I’m an idiot who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Why have they allowed me, precisely me, to bring this little person home to keep her alive?
And yet, in the midst of all this, when Evie was just a few weeks old, people started asking me when I was planning to have another one.
‘Let me take this one out of the diapers first!’ I told my mother, trying to make my frustration seem like a joke.
From then on, all I heard from friends and family, even random strangers in stores, was that this baby was not a proper baby without the addition of another baby.
‘Oh, you have to give him a brother or a sister.’
“He’ll be spoiled if you don’t.”
“She won’t know how to socialize.”
“I was an only child and I will never forgive my parents for that.”
“She will be that girl who doesn’t know how to share and no one will like her.”
“She will be lonely when you die.”
“She’ll be weird.”
I could have thrown them all out a window.
When Evie turned one, I began to fear that people would ask me if I had children.
I took a deep breath, smiled and simply said, to invariably perplexed faces, that I had a child and that no, I wasn’t going to have more, and that no, there really wasn’t a ‘reason’. .
That said, when Evie was about 18 months old and I felt like I was being allowed to return from my new life under the sea for a few breaths of air, I introduced the idea of having another child to Ross. .
He wasn’t totally against it, but he was now a man who had seen things, like rivers of diarrhea at 3 in the morning and Pregnantzilla Wife. He was perfectly happy with his beloved girl and was in no hurry to add to the chaos.
Curiously, no one had ever approached him to whisper about the terrible evil of having “only one” child. Absolutely nobody. Of course, he had much more normal reasons for wanting to have a second child. He loved my baby so much that he was excited to see what else we could invent.
I thought it would be great for her to have a brother to love and be loved by. With my 38th birthday in sight, Ross approved the idea with a thumbs up (note, not two).
I consulted the ovulation kit once again and we got to work. Cut to ten months of nothing happening and me sitting talking to my doctor about what it would take to get pregnant again. Now, everyone has to make their own decisions in these matters, and I would probably feel very differently if we had been talking about trying to have my first baby.
But I knew, in an instant, that IVF was simply not the path I wanted to follow. He was not prepared for the physical regimen. He was not prepared for the emotional lows he had seen so many disappointed couples experience. And, frankly, he couldn’t keep up with the expense.
Jo says Evie grew up with the dedicated, undivided time and attention of both her parents, not to mention finances.
You’ve probably guessed by now that Ross had no trouble convincing him to stop trying to have Baby Number 2. He nodded, shrugged, and said how much he loved our little family just the way it was. And he couldn’t have agreed more.
I did not feel heartbroken by this turn of events, which says a lot in itself.
I truly had an overwhelming certainty that the universe had made a decision and I could now continue raising my only precious son, a privilege, I know, that has eluded many people I care about. It is unbearable that in my life there are two families who have buried children.
So Evie grew up with the dedicated, undivided time and attention of both her parents, not to mention finances.
As for the idea that her status as an only child has turned her into a wizened wallflower or a spoiled brat, she was always the kind of girl who would run to the kids’ club during the holidays; At age seven, she told me that she could “make friends in minutes.”
I didn’t have that confidence at the same age. It fills me with pride to see her defend herself in conversations with adults she has just met, and I am convinced that it is because she grew up surrounded by a lot of adult company.
To my relief, she was never one of those kids who begged for a brother or sister.
“I like that it’s just us,” she told my father when he asked her if she ever wished she had a brother. And yet, the criticism continued, for me and for mothers like me.
A fellow mother I know was once told that it would have been better for her not to have had children. Which I’m sure would make women who don’t have children laugh, given the avalanche of lawsuits that never stop coming.
I also have friends who have been chastised for having three or four children. Apparently, it is “really selfish” and “ecologically irresponsible” to overpopulate the world in this way.
So if you want a little pat on the head from society, or just go about your business without provoking unsolicited comments about your procreational status, you’d better make sure you have two respectable, orderly children. Preferably one of each sex. OK? Good.
In terms of ‘sliding door’ moments, of course, I occasionally wonder what another mini-me or Ross would have been like. But it just wasn’t meant to be, and that’s okay.
Now I’m 54 years old, people only have to look at me to know that I’m too old to have more children. So, finally, I’m relieved to say they stopped asking.
As for Evie, she’s kind, smart, and the one-liners she gives me are often cruel, but so funny that I can’t help but feel proud. She’s weird, the dissidents got that right. And thank God, because all the best people are.
She is my favorite person in the whole world and I would run in front of a bus for her.
I love my only girl.