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The setting is laughably picturesque: a small hotel room in an old Italian city. Moonlight streams through the windows, which have no panes, only heavy shutters we leave open when we're asleep. The problem is, we're not. Half a block down from our building, the local church chimes eleven, but my son is having trouble sleeping. Two days before his fourth birthday, his body wound to a clock ticking six thousand miles away, he can't seem to settle down. Let me be more accurate: He is bouncing on the bed, leaping from bed to floor and landing with a thud that sounds to me and my husband, with that urgent paranoia parents develop in airline and hotel-room conditions, as loud as a crash of trash-can cymbals. He stops when we tell him to (and our requests quickly become orders, verging on threats) but thirty seconds later he's at it again. He literally cannot contain himself. His energy is visible inside his skin, like a cartoon heart banging to get out. He leaps; he lands. Any minute now, the strangers in the next room are going to bang on the wall. Finally, in desperation, I suggest a midnight walk. Ah, much better. The air is warm, or warm enough; the stone streets are empty of cars and lined with interesting shop windows to stop and examine. Now that he can move, my son is happy, calm, swinging his arms. After a while, we stop and sit on the stoop of a store that sells knives and swords and other implements irresistible to four-year-old eyes. "So why do you think you had a hard day?" I ask him. "All the travel, or are you excited about your birthday, or what?" "Well, Mom," he says, bending his hand back at the wrist in the grown-up gesture that accompanies all his explanations, "it's that sometimes my brain is in control, and sometimes it's my body. Tonight, it was my body." I turn to look at him, all my residual frustration transmuted into admiration. What maturity! What self-knowledge! What a subtle understanding of psychology! Eat your heart out, Sigmund Freud; how old were you when you came up with the concept of the id? We talked for a long time that night about the idea of control. What triggers certain moods and urges? What helps us move beyond those urges if we want or need to do so? (Giving up sugar, I suggested, but my son repudiated that idea.) The conversation has proven to be a touchstone, providing us a vocabulary to use at difficult moments. "Okay, you need to get your brain back in control," is a sentence we've spoken often since then. Always in a kind, firm tone of voice, of course; always in the context of being the grown-up--the one who learned long ago how to master those bodily urges, how to tone them down and turn them off. Yeah, and I've got a bridge to sell you. After thirty years of practice, my brain still can't claim victory. At best, it can hold my body to a draw. My latest urge--not quite uncontrollable, but cunningly forceful, astonishing to me in its insidiousness and tenacity--is the urge to have another child. I have two already, ages seventeen months and four-and-a-half. There are many, many reasons not to have another. Time is one: so far, my husband and I have managed to trade off working and parenting, doing roughly forty-sixty duty in order to avoid daycare and still both work part-time. This has been made possible (as they'd say on Sesame Street) by the proximity of my parents, who moved cross-country and found new jobs in order to help with the boys. We've been extremely lucky. We're also extremely tired. My husband is about to finish grad school and take a full-time job. Add to this the fact that I'd like to write novels . . . and maybe homeschool . . . and someday exercise again . . . and it becomes clear that this kind of schedule simply wouldn't be possible with three children. (My husband maintains that it's not possible even with two.) And what about parental attention? Hard enough to divide it now. Wouldn't someone--the new baby? the middle child?--lose out? Still, I want another one. I could drop my own work-for-pay and my literary ambitions and become a full-time mom, of course, but that complicates the money angle. Braces, Christmas presents, a bigger car, a bigger house, college for three. Is it possible to do all that on a single salary--and not a high-powered computer programmer's take-home pay but the wages of an assistant professor of educational history? Maybe. Maybe we could find a daycare situation that the kids would like. Maybe my parents would retire. Maybe we could learn to counterfeit money in our basement. To be honest, these are mainly my husband's objections. The conflicts of time and money don't loom so large for me. I can work at night. I can sleep when I'm dead. I can write a best-selling cookbook/memoir entitled "101 Ways to Fix Gruel." For me, the real issue is environmental. This Earth hosts six billion people right now, most of them living in circumstances I can't imagine, under conditions I wouldn't believe, and our population is growing at the rate of six million per month. The effect of having another baby seems irresponsible--especially when I consider that Americans use, and waste, a disproportionate amount of the world's resources. This essay began, remember, with a family jaunt to Italy. I don't know how many Bangladeshi children could live on the amount of money it took us to take our trip, but I'm certain the numbers would shame me. But still, I want another one. What about adoption? you ask. If I want another child so badly, why not offer a home to any of the many, many children who need one? Because adoption is expensive. It's scary. There are all kinds of complications. It seems like a lot of work--more work than "just" parenting. And what if the child ends up somehow "lesser"--less smart, less musical, less adorable than my birth children? Would I still love him or her as much? Or would I always be comparing, horribly and invidiously? On the other hand, something could go wrong with one of my birth children as well, invalidating the logic we're using and severely complicating the time and money issues on the way. My friends encourage me. "Your babies are the kind the world needs!" they insist. "They'd be environmentally conscious! Socially responsible! Politically liberal!" This line of reasoning seems to me sheer, self-congratulatory elitism. And yet, lest I begin to sound a touch too holier-than-thou, allow me to relate the following anecdote: Not long ago, my husband and I were discussing vasectomies, finessing the arguments pro and con, trying to come to some conclusion. "Another baby would cost too much," my husband said. "Pshaw," I answered. "It would take too much time," he said. "What's time for?" I responded. "On the other hand, what about world population?" This time, it was he who did the pooh-poohing. "You don't know what the future will hold," he said. "Maybe we'll colonize Mars. Maybe there'll be a plague. You just don't know." He was speaking entirely tongue-in-cheek. But before I could catch myself, before my superego could clamp down the thought, it bloomed in my brain-- "You know, he's right! There could be a plague!" People laugh when I tell this story, but I think it shows the lengths to which my body will go to get what it wants. I recognize, believe me, that yearning for a deadly epidemic is self-centered, greedy, and racist (where is a plague most likely to happen? Not North America or Western Europe, surely). But in spite of everything, I can't help wanting another child. What a powerful drive it is, what an amazing force, this evolutionary urge to go forth and multiply. It's literally what we were born to do. So do it, then! my body cries. I'm resisting as best I can. Not that I'm doing so well. I've already got two kids, of course, and I haven't taken any irreversible steps against having more. I still have all my maternity clothes. The vasectomy concept hasn't made it off the drawing board. Still, I'm trying. I'm writing this essay, in fact, as a way to convince myself--get myself so disgusted that I'll finally take action, drive my husband to his doctor's appointment. I remember my son on the bed, the energy shooting his body across the room like a bottle rocket in a balloon, and I think about how difficult it is to say no to our bodies, their strainings and strivings. Saying no is part of growing up, I guess. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to do it. In the meantime, I'm going outside to take a midnight walk.
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