London - My two sons were hunched over their Star Wars Lego set, constructing an elaborate inter-galactic spaceship together, when tears suddenly sprang from my eyes.
I stared at the display of photographs on our kitchen wall – happy snapshots taken at the beach or the zoo, at parties or on bicycle rides – of myself, my husband and our two little boys, and fought hard to rein in my emotions.
That evening, when my husband, Colin, arrived home from his job as a magazine editor, I was like a cat on a hot tin roof. Somehow, I managed to wait until we’d had dinner and were relaxing on the sofa before, yet again, I broached the subject which had long divided us.
“I really want another baby,” I told Colin, avoiding his gaze, in a vain attempt to hide how anxious I felt about the outcome of this delicate conversation.
It’s a discussion we’ve had many times over the past three years. We are both 42. And while I know I am blessed to have a loving husband, two beautiful, healthy sons – Eli, six, and five-year-old Gabe, a comfortable home in London and money in the bank, I also know that there is something missing from my life: a third child.
“Are you sure you don’t want another one?” I asked Colin that night, hoping against hope that he might have had a change of heart.
He hadn’t. He sighed, shook his head, then repeated what he always says when I raise the subject.
“We’re through the baby tunnel,” he said. “Why would you want to put us through that again? We’re just getting our lives back.”
Colin is right, of course. Our sons are both happily settled at school. They sleep well, and can play on their own for long stretches without us having to watch them too intently. After two bouts of maternity leave and a demanding 15-year career editing magazines, I have turned to more school-run-friendly freelance writing, and work is going well.
After the draining maelstrom of the baby and toddler years, in one sense I agree with my husband. Finally, we have regained some kind of family equilibrium, and we are definitely all happier for it.
I can completely understand my husband’s common sense stance. And yet, I remain strangely intoxicated by the idea of having another child, invigorated by imagining the noise, chaos and drama that would ensue if we were lucky enough to have another baby to join our happy brood.
It’s not a newborn baby in itself that I crave – though I do admit to feeling a little tearful and envious when Prince William and Kate Middleton were photographed cradling their beautiful newborn son, Prince George, last month.
Nor am I hung-up on having a daughter to balance things out in our very male household, since I adore having and raising boys.
No, my yearning is in large part based on the delicious nostalgia of my own North Manchester childhood when, as the youngest of five children, our home was always full of people.
Every room reverberated with laughter and arguments, and I often feared the stairs would collapse, given the amount of human traffic that thundered up and down it as my mother welcomed friends over for dinner and onto spare mattresses, just as a cats’ home welcomes in strays.
By contrast, I feel my own marital home is often eerie in its silence. Of course, our boisterous sons are far from quiet – they fight with light-sabres, bicker like old men and can shout the house down when they’re in a temper. But there are only two of my boys and as a family we are only four, so there is only so much noise we can create, even when we are at our most rumbustious.
My siblings have all gone on to replicate the chaos of our childhood home – each of my three sisters has had four children, with my brother trailing only slightly behind with three. When I am with them in their busy, crowded homes – which teem with teenagers lounging about on sofas, chatting into mobile phones or pilfering from the fridge – my siblings are always quick to advise me to stick at two children.
“It’s an easier life,” they argue, the enormous indigo shadows beneath their eyes revealing their exhaustion and worry. “You can give your children your proper attention that way.”
I know only too well how right they are, how sensible that advice is. As the youngest of five children, I craved one-on-one time with my mother who always seemed to be either inseparable from the kitchen stove or out running errands.
I remember hanging off her arm, stuck to her like a limpet, while we ate dinner, just to remind her that I was there, her youngest daughter, and ready to bask in any small attention she might be able to offer me.
Unlike my mother, I am not pulled in five different directions (only two), and neither Eli nor Gabe ever have to wait more than a few minutes for my full attention.
And yet, when I observe my siblings and their families, I see the satisfaction and happiness behind their tired smiles and I know that they are not quite telling me the truth. Their full families, their burgeoning love for each other, stings every time I see it.
Colin views all this differently. With an estranged father and just one sister, he told me soon after we met in 2002 that he wasn’t cut out to be either a husband or a dad.
He didn’t put me off – I was convinced that I could change his mind, somehow. Instead, I was left heartbroken when he ditched me two years later, adamant that he could never give me what I wanted: marriage and children.
I was 35 at the time. The pain of being let down at this crucial juncture in my life, and indeed, in my fertility, was almost indescribable. Thankfully, after a torturous summer apart, Colin made contact with me, claiming that his time away had given him a fresh perspective on us and on our future.
I was hesitant – but I took him back. Then, a few weeks later, Colin clumsily proposed to me as we were washing up at the kitchen sink, saying that he wanted me and everything that went with having a relationship with me.
I was overjoyed. “Really? Marriage? Babies? The lot?” I asked weepily.
“If it means I can be with you, then yes,” he said.
Such was my ecstasy at being reunited, and so happy were we both, that I never tried to pin him down on what then seemed like the minor details of just how many children we would have. I didn’t want to push my luck, I suppose.
We got married in December 2005 and conceived Eli during our Caribbean honeymoon, both of us surprised and pleased that it had happened so quickly. It was only after we had produced two perfect boys within the space of 18 months that the first “Is that it?” conversation arose between us.
Colin was resolute: We were both 39 and exhausted. He said he didn’t have the energy or inclination to have any more children, and added that financially it also made perfect sense to stop at two.
While Colin calmly ruled out further children, I burnt with longing.
His arguments against adding to our family were irrelevant to me. What was money when it came to the adventure of creating new life?
There is nothing in this world that comes even close to that delicious nuzzle of nose against cheek first thing in the morning, or feeling that tiny hand in mine when strolling down the street.
Motherhood, I discovered each time I experienced it anew, was like falling in love – and I wanted to do it again and again and again.
I left the subject alone for a while, half-hoping for an accidental pregnancy, but Colin was careful. Very careful.
There was no way he was going to be careless, especially when he felt so strongly.
A few months later, I broached the subject again after a close friend had her third child at the age of 40 – but Colin’s answer remained the same: no. He didn’t want any more children. Our family was perfect. Why couldn’t I be happy with what we had?
It was a good question, and one I struggled to answer. Somehow two children felt so convenient, so boring. We could fit into one tiny family car. We could sit comfortably around a small table at a restaurant.
We could book tidy family holiday packages for four. But while Colin loved and appreciated all those benefits, devoting himself to fatherhood with the zeal and energy of a man half his age, I couldn’t help but think that we were missing out and began to feel resentful of his stubborn attitude.
I tried to change his mind, taking every opportunity to thrust my friends’ new babies into his arms, watching him smile, enamoured by their sweet-scented newness. But then he would look at me, anticipating what I was thinking, and shake his head. No. Every time it happened, I was left crushed.
Time passed, and I became broodier and broodier. I became obsessed with the idea of a third child – and the more I thought about it, about how wonderful it would be, the angrier I became.
Colin was my husband and I loved him dearly. Yet he was categorically denying me the one thing that would make me (and, I was convinced, him, too) happy.
In one particularly heated conversation last December, I tried to broker a deal: If he agreed to have another baby, I would shoulder the entire burden of the first year. I would be the one who always got up at night. I would do all the childcare on my own. It was a generous and perhaps foolish offer, which serves only to illustrate how desperate I was to try to bring Colin around.
After all, I wasn’t a particularly patient mother at the start and, after having Eli at 36, I struggled with late motherhood. The crying, the broken nights and the lack of control had all been so unexpected and difficult.
Colin’s response was that it was unfair to try to railroad him into fatherhood for the third time. But, I said, fighting back, few people ever regret having children, and even our sons were in favour of a new addition to the family. They once asked me if they could have a little brother or sister.
“Why would you want that?” I asked them. ‘They’d only annoy you and keep you up at night and grab your toys.”
“But it would be so much fun,” Eli replied.
With the words catching in my throat, I had to explain that it was unlikely that there would be a new baby in the family and blamed my advancing years. It wasn’t the truth, exactly, but it wasn’t a lie either.
If Colin had a miraculous change of heart, I would be thrilled to fall pregnant.
But not only are my chances of conceiving growing smaller with every passing year, the risks to any new baby’s health grow commensurately, too.
I may secretly relish the stories I read in newspapers and magazines about women in their mid to late-forties conceiving naturally and giving birth to healthy babies, but I know it means little in reality. I may, if I am lucky, still have some years left in which to conceive, but there is one significant barrier to conception even before Mother Nature has her say – and that’s my husband.
Slowly, I am trying to become resigned to our tidy, tiny family.
Instead of banging my head against a firmly shut door, I am filling our home with friends and their children, recreating the comforting, noisy atmosphere of my childhood, which, in some very small way, makes me feel better.
But I can’t deny it: There is a grieving process going on inside me for the third child I know I will probably never have. – Daily Mail