A family calculus
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How many kids do you have? Is he your only? Is he your first?
The answer depends on who’s asking, on the context, my emotional state, who’s listening – each of these variables funnels into the complex equation which I must solve in my head within seconds, no calculator allowed. Each day since Olivia died, I’ve considered what it means to be a parent to a child no one else can see. Even I can only see her in my mind, but she’s there, the primary variable in our family calculus.
No matter how many more children I have, the number people see – the number I see – will be n-1. Always missing one. The feeling of missingness, as visceral as that of a lost limb, is at its most intense in the early months after the loss. Many parents, including me, feel compelled to get pregnant again as quickly as possible. It can seem like the obvious choice, to make your parenthood visible to the outside world again. But of course, as soon as the pregnancy is visible, you realize you haven’t solved the equation at all, you’ve only introduced another variable.
Is this your first? I dreaded that common line of questioning, and sometimes answered with a lie (acceptable lie recipients: the grocery cashier, the bus driver, the person passing on the sidewalk). But the answer was clear in my mind, at least. It wasn’t my first time experiencing the nausea, the heartburn, the scans, giving birth, my milk coming in, postpartum recovery. If someone with a more consistent presence in my life asked the dreaded question, I told the truth. This was not my first experience with the physical and emotional dramas of pregnancy. One plus one equals two.
After my second child was born, new acquaintances often asked the same question – an easy conversation starter for those not initiated into the world of baby loss. Is he your first? Is he your only? And the equation got more complicated. No, he’s not my first child, but he’s the only one who’s lived long enough to get a bedtime routine, to start solids, to learn to walk (a real conversation-stopper if you phrase it that way). In the day-to-day minutiae of parenting, I was still a first-timer. The constant reminders about my naivete of infant milestones were painful, though, because I shouldn’t have been a first-timer.
Is he your only? That one cuts deep. No, he has a sister, but he's never met her, and he never will. True, he doesn’t have to share a room, we don’t need a double stroller, there is no one to fight over toys with at home. In the ways the person is asking about, the day-to-day logistics, he is an “only” child, but not our family’s onlychild. There is the urge to solve this mismatch by having another child, but then I would have three children where people only saw two. Olivia will never be here again, and I will always have too few children, even if I had four (you’d see three), five (you’d see four), or six (you get the idea). It’s ultimately a problem that I won’t solve in my lifetime.
A part of my family will always be missing.
n-1=x
How do you answer the family calculus questions? This is a recurring discussion on Glow in the Woods over the years. A painful conversation for so many of us to have. When and what do you share and how do you decide who gets to hear what? How do you feel when you answer one way or another? How have your answers changed over time?