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We've all seen them, those birth notices that announce glibly that "the backseat is now full." Usually there's a line just before that in which various older siblings welcome the new arrival into the fold. Generally two of them (in deference, I guess, to the average backseat) but sometimes more. They're either squeezing together nice and cozy or buying one of those minivans that symbolize, to me, the end of life as I prefer to know it. This "no more room" device seems to be an accepted way of informing well-wishers and nosy-parkers alike that you won't be having any more children. Less euphemistically that, failing ineffective birth control or a sudden attack of insatiable baby lust, your family is now complete. Our family is complete. And our backseat is remarkably roomy. Room for a plethora of puzzles, numerous stuffed animals, and one child to wave her queenly arms about as she directs her various minions. Room enough that I can strategically locate my daughter in the center of the rear seat so that she is unable to repeatedly kick me in the back over some trivial slight to her four-year-old personhood. There's space to spare, and that's just how we like it. My bicycle, however, was full when my daughter was born. Too full, in fact. There was no facility, under the recalcitrant laws of physics, for my oh-so-light, bright purple, aero-barred racing machine to accommodate a child-seat and its chubby occupant. Reluctantly, I joined the ranks of mountain-bike-riding mums, furiously pedalling my way through legions of capri-pant-legs around the family-friendly bike paths of the river foreshore. No more gritted-teeth, traffic-weaving, bus-racing behavior for me. Baby on board--slow down, be sensible, smile. Think of your child. So much of my life now seemed to demand adherence to this new mantra. There was much more to be sacrificed than my racing bike. Slow down: if your baby wants to breastfeed all day, let her. Be sensible: don't go out if your baby seems tired. Smile: through your exhaustion, bewilderment, and isolation. Like most new mothers, I quickly learned that the time for relaxed reading, dreaming, losing myself in music or poetry, sleeping in on the weekend (or even simply sleeping) was over. For the first year at least, everything that had once been so integral to my sense of self was put on hold. And it became apparent that without the space in my life for those things, I was irritable, resentful, even depressed. As many others before me, despite loving my daughter to distraction, I wondered why I had done this to my life. Fortunately for my husband and me, the path to damage-control seemed obvious--stop at one. As soon as this deceptively simple notion was before us, we felt an immediate sense of relief, the way opening before us, the wind at our backs. What had seemed an endless swamp was now finite. And manageable. After all, I may not have been able to race with a child on the back of my bike, but at least I could still ride. And the opportunities for me to once again career off on my racing bike would be more, and sooner, if we remained a family of three. Our earlier mantra of "never let them outnumber you" became "always outnumber them." It seemed an obvious and right choice for us. As it turned out, this idea did not sit well with others. It seems that mourning the loss of my former freedoms, complaining of boredom and chronic exhaustion, even loudly and stridently asserting that I had no idea why I'd done this and would never do it again, were all perfectly acceptable--as rites of passage on the way to the second child. When we had finally decided to start "trying" to become pregnant, one child was all I could imagine. But I knew even then that this was just a ruse on the way to the acceptable number--two--a way to trick myself into acquiescence. During labour, and again during the newborn period, I stridently reasserted my commitment to the single-child family. These, it seems, were acceptable declarations--the understandable insanity many women experience in the face of overwhelming pain, exhaustion, and the radical overhaul of their lives. Temporary, though, a way-station to pass through before the return to normality. To begin with, even I was never really convinced by my protestations. But when the idea of really, truly "only" having one became palpable, it came as a revelation. And three was immediately the obvious shape for our family. The news broke gently to an avalanche of concern. Friends and family, well-meaning strangers at the supermarket, moved along a continuum from disbelief (you'll change your mind later), through outrage (you can't just have one!), to a resigned head-shaking sadness (you don't know what you're missing). In response--we didn't, we can, and no, we probably don't know what we're missing. We agree that our daughter would probably enjoy having a sibling, but we also believe firmly that a baby is not a gift for another child. And we do know what we're not missing--our remaining freedoms and our sense of equilibrium. And that is enough for us. Our decision is seen by many as selfish, and certainly it is. It is precisely because we saw very quickly the extent of our own frustration and disenchantment that we moved to take steps to mitigate that. Yes, we have made things easier for ourselves. In another sense, however, I know that as an often bored, impatient, and frustrated mother of one child, I would be an intolerable mother of more. And that the mothering I am able to give the daughter I have is immeasurably enhanced because we have made space for ourselves to breathe, and created a visible light at the end of the at-times stultifying tunnel of child-rearing. For the most part, my friends continued down the tunnel, singing cheerfully as they went; if they needed more light, they simply knocked windows in the walls, using tools I didn't seem to have. If they had been taken aback by our decision to limit our family to one child, I was dumbstruck by the enthusiasm with which they added to theirs. Whereas my response to the physical and mental demands of parenting, the increasing complexities and constraints of my life, had been to throw up my hands and make a break for the surface, theirs was one of determined acceptance. In the face of serial pregnancies, I was at first flabbergasted, then felt a little betrayed. Hadn't we all said that this was too hard? Hadn't we all sworn never to do it again? To resist the slings and arrows of social convention and flaunt our compact families in the face of the nay-sayers? And now here they were buying double-prams and reading up on sibling adjustment. Some of those friends have gone on to have families of three and four children, the way behind them peppered liberally with "I'll never do this again," "This will be the last one," and "Slap me if I talk about getting pregnant again." For them, these declarations were all part of the process. They've continued to join in the chorus of complaint about the frustrations of childrearing, but they accept these as being integral to growing the family they want, a trade-off I couldnŐt seem to make. It took me some time to accept the radical divergence in our paths. For a long time, I thought my way was the only way for everyone, at least everyone who was honest with themselves. Surely the urge to reproduce once you knew what was involved was nothing more than a product of social conditioning--an unconscious image of what constitutes a "real" family. My crusade to get people to admit "the truth," as I saw it, that motherhood was an exhausting, soul-sapping exercise for which the rewards were comparatively slim, was brought back to earth only by the most simple of all realisations: People are different. As a social scientist, I know this, write about it, teach it. But it was as a mother that I understood it deeply for the first time. The toll motherhood takes on me is not the toll it takes on others, even those whom I perceive to be like me in many other ways. And the costs of motherhood, even felt as keenly as I feel them, are well worth it on the balance sheet of others' goals and desires. In the subjectivity of my own experience, one child is the right number, while my closest friend, whom I consider so like me as to be a soulmate, is unsure as to whether or not she is "done" at three. Subjectivity, difference, personal choice. Such simple, crucial concepts. And yet there are corners to our choosing, unseen parameters that guide our own decisions, and the way we arch our eyebrows at those of others. Remarkably, it seems that in our culture, there is only one completely acceptable number of children for any family that has a choice: two. You will argue, of course. Surely we are more enlightened than that. After all, we all believe in difference and personal choice, right? And yet the children in the model family that looms large at us from advertising images are almost invariably the same: one boy, one girl. Ideal. It's understandable, having two children of one gender, that you might spin the dice a third time, but always amidst sidelong glances and shakes of the head. Trying for a boy, eh? When will it all end? What if you get another girl? Once you hit four, the glances are somewhat more protracted, the comments a little more snide. What else do you do? Haven't you heard of birth control? Three is too many, one is too few. And the childless, of course, do not enter into the equation, spinning as they are in their own orbit somewhere on a far-flung planet. For some of my friends, there was a certain resolute quality to their decision to add to their family. They toyed with the idea of one, but it seemed wrong, incomplete. They were concerned about all those only-child problems and of being branded selfish. And so they had another child. And whether content or otherwise, were never quite sure how much of this had been their own decision and how much had been dictated by some arbitrary notion of what constitutes the "right" family size. It seems like an easy place to silence argument--right here, at the muddy intersection of subjectivity and conditioning. A simple matter to say: make the decision that seems right for you. Very politically correct, I think, these days, to argue for the right of the individual to make whatever decision about family size they choose. Arguments about family size, however, are often inextricably tied to more intractable issues such as population control, environmental impact, stewardship of resources, even quality of life. Perhaps it's not about the capacity of our backseats but, rather, of our world. And, yes, all these arguments can be reduced once again to the individual. My friend argues that her large family lives simply and consumes less environmental resources than many smaller families. At the same time, I argue that her family consumes vital welfare resources as a direct result of her conscious choice to continue having children. These are complex ethical and environmental issues, too vast to consider in depth here. I'd simply like to think that we consider them, as well as our own metaphorical backseats. Between my friend and I, these arguments fly back and forth over lunch; good-natured verbal jousting with a darker undercurrent of "my choice versus your choice." It's somewhat easier for me to walk the holier-than-thou line on this issue than it is for my friend. I can always rationalize my choice by leaning on the population explosion argument. It's a nice barrow to be able to push in my defence. But if I'm honest, it was never a driving reason for us. Never a reason at all. No more than the size of their backseat really is for anyone else. I'll marshal that altruism in my defence if I feel particularly cornered, but really our decisions were all selfish, all the time. The desire to replicate ourselves, followed rapidly by the desire to extricate ourselves. For me, it was the need for equilibrium and a sense of space that tipped the scales--the ability to parent without feeling like I was being squeezed on all sides, like I was barely keeping myself from running from the house. It doesn't seem so much to ask. And yet is so unacceptable to so many. The population-control argument is cleaner, has an authoritative intellectual ring to it, and shifts the focus from the obvious character flaws that prevented me being a model parent of a model family. But, although I have some sympathy with it, it's fundamentally dishonest. For me, it wasn't about the size of the world, or my backseat, or even my bicycle. It was about the space in my life. I couldn't know it until I had one child: that one would be enough. That with my daughter, my head and heart and hands would be full. We know those birth notices don't fool anyone, of course. Because after all, we could just buy bigger cars. We know it's a shared code, that the backseat is a metaphor for something. But I wish that we could just look across the table and tell each other what that something is. That our lives are full, that we're stopping, that we've reached the right number for us. Whatever that number is. That we feel stifled and want our lives back, if that is our reality. Or that we're having more, because our children fill us with joy, not because we need two more for a football team. I wish we didn't so expect the second-guessing of our choices that we felt the need to pre-empt and deflect the issue by printing a euphemistic announcement in a public forum, however apparently lighthearted it all seems. I wish that we all felt free to base this most important of decisions on what we perceive to be right for our sanity, our own needs, and perhaps those of the world around us. To accept that others have done the same, no matter how different from ours their choices may be. And then I wouldn't tell you that I stopped at one because David Suzuki said it was crucial to our planet's survival, because you wouldn't make me feel cornered into doing so.
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