Once upon a time . . . I was never having children

I always liked children, but never had any desire to have any of my own.  When we got married, it wasn’t that children weren’t high on the list of things to do . . . they simply weren’t on the list.  With a couple of exceptions, our friends fell into two categories – those who got married in their early twenties and had kids pretty soon after, or those who got married in their mid-thirties and had kids straight away.  We were both 25 when we got married, and we were upfront about the fact that kids weren’t our thing.  Everyone (especially older female relatives) told us (read: me) that of course we’d change my mind about kids.  Of course we’d have them.  I was equally as certain that I would not change my mind.


Of course, what all the other people said came to pass.  Living in a foreign country, happily travelling through my early thirties . . . and then a friend had the most adorable baby that ever there was.  Looking back, it was the perfect storm of events – my age probably led to me (unconsciously) considering the fact that I was skating towards the point at which conceiving a baby might be a lot more difficult, we spent a lot of time with our friends and their new baby, and he was just such a sweetheart.  One summer’s day, I was flying out of town on the same day as my friends, and I was seated behind them on the plane.  Their son was standing up on his father’s lap, reaching through the seat to me and giggling and gabbling at me.  It was at that moment that it hit me.  I want a baby.  At that particular point, let us all recall that I was ten years into a relationship that was never going to include children.  So, I gave it several months before I mentioned it to my husband, thinking that this baby-longing might just be a passing fancy.  When we did start discussing children, it took a while for us to decide that yes, we would try for a baby.  By that stage, we were both in our mid-thirties, so we also considered the possibility that, even with trying, we might not be able to have a baby.


It turns out that it was a very good thing that we’d been conscientious with birth control when we were younger, because conceiving a baby was not an issue for us.  Within four months, I was pregnant, and our eldest daughter was born six weeks before our 10^th wedding anniversary.  It was a fast labour (just over two hours from start to finish, and I am not kidding), and she was born with pneumonia and not breathing.  They took her out of my arms and rushed her to Special Care, where she was intubated, ventilated, hooked up to all number of machines and put in a humidicrib.  When I got to see her, about an hour later, it was sad to see a tiny, tiny little person with all these tubes and wires and things all over her little body.  Emotionally, I still hadn’t processed the idea that this was my daughter, yet here she was, under constant medical supervision because she was very unwell.


That night, sitting in my hospital bed while she was in Special Care down the hall, I suddenly realised how lucky we were that we’d gone straight to the hospital when I woke up in labour.  She was my first baby – they always say how labour takes longer the first time.  What if I’d thought that it was just the start of labour?  What if I hadn’t woken my husband to drive me to hospital?  What if she’d been born at home, not breathing?  That night, my daughter’s first night in the world, rates as one of the scariest nights of my life.  The realisation that one small change in what we’d done could have seen her die on the day that she was born.


Happily for us, the reality is that she was born in a place where she received immediate medical attention.  She recovered from the pneumonia and was allowed home six days after she was born.  She was a challenging newborn (she startled easily and woke a lot; we were first time parents who had utterly no idea what we were in for!), but there were no long term effects from her rapid (and scary) entry into the world.


After that, I was pretty happy with the idea of one child.  And I think I would have been happy permanently with only one child, but one day my husband said, “I think we should have another baby.”  And the instant those words were out of his mouth, I wanted another child.  Again, within four months, I was pregnant.  Miss #2 arrived in slightly slower fashion than her big sister (four hours, as opposed to two) on the Labour Day public holiday.  She was born breathing, healthy, normal. 


By this stage, my husband and I were skating towards our late thirties.  We figured that we had two healthy children and that the older we got, the higher the chances of some sort of issue, with conception, pregnancy or genetic issues with the baby.  One or the other of us would occasionally make a joke about a third child, but neither of us really pushed the issue. 


And then, one night, we didn’t worry about contraception.  We both figured that we were too old for an accidental pregnancy from a single throw-caution-to-the-wind moment.  And this is how, the week before my fortieth birthday, I found myself staring at two lines on a pregnancy test stick.  And at that moment, I realised just how much I wanted a third child, and how lucky I was that the universe had conspired to bring that about.


Our son arrived at the end of our eldest’s first year at school, in the very last week of Term 4.  He was the slowest of the three of them (six hours of labour) and the only one born during “business hours”.  My husband likes to tell everyone that I drove myself to hospital while in labour; he came straight from his office when I called him.  He got a call about an hour after he arrived, from a colleague asking why he wasn’t at their afternoon meeting.  He replied, “I’m at the hospital.  My wife is in labour.”  His colleague decided that was a damn fine excuse.


And now here I am, nineteen years into a marriage that was never supposed to include children with three of them – a three-year-old son and two daughters aged seven and nine.  It is true that some days I look around and the piles of books and the toy cars and the Lego pieces (oh my goodness, the Lego pieces) and I have a pang of nostalgia for those days where no one was dumping six copies of Captain Underpants on my couch or leaving dirty socks and a trail of muddy school uniform when she was sneaking into my bathroom after dinner (even though there’s a perfectly good bathroom downstairs near her room).  For the most part, however, I don’t know how my life ever functioned without these little people and all their crazy demands and their noise and commotion and stuff and activities and their, “I love you Mum, and you’re the best”.  I never realised just how much I was going to love being a mother, nor how much fun kids can be (except when they’re having tantrums.  At that point, I’m happy to sell them to the circus).