How do you know when it's time to let go?

(For once, I'm not talking about jobs)

I’ve been holding on to almost all of Atlas’ baby things, for the next baby I’m beginning to think we’re not having. It’s been both an ongoing topic of discussion and the elephant in the room during many other discussions.

I want another baby, for some reasons I’ll outline and other reasons I suppose are more abstract, more feelings than they are thoughts. Brandin does not want another baby, for reasons that are entirely, to my mind, practical and therefore (to my mind) less compelling than my reasons.

We have enough children, he says; we have one together, and two from his first marriage, boys of 10 and 8 of whom he shares custody, 50/50, with his ex wife (and my friend, Kasey, also the photographer who took the incredible photos that accompanied publicity around my dating and sex book, which felt kind of weird but also hilarious).

We can’t afford another baby, he says; we have just finally started to make inroads into paying off our debt and establishing some kind of savings account that could potentially maybe hopefully see us going on a family holiday next year, or being able to move house to somewhere slightly bigger, with a basement to send the boys to when they’re playing Minecraft while arguing with one another.

Atlas, who turns 2 in a fortnight (as does this very newsletter, how has this time disappeared, or been stolen, from me?!), has just started sleeping through the night in, I kid you not, the last two weeks; how could we go back to those long, sleepless nights with a newborn?

Plus, as he reminds me, I really didn’t love being pregnant. While this is true, of course, it feels a bit like a rebuke, as though, if I had loved being pregnant, if I had been one of those women who feels happier and healthier and sexier than ever! throughout those 40 weeks, he would be more inclined to say yes to baby number two. I should’ve pretended to love it, I’ve thought to myself, more than once.

My reasons to have a baby are probably less sensible, but, as I said, more compelling. I honestly never thought I would have a baby – at first, that was because I definitely didn’t want one, until I was told that I had a very low egg count and may find it difficult to conceive. That felt like a punishment for the folly of having said, over and over, to anyone who’d listen, that I didn’t want to be a mother. I even made a YouTube video about it. (I’m rolling my eyes at my past self.)

When I got pregnant with Atlas with, honestly, very little effort or planning, I felt so incredibly lucky. And – I’m going to say it, so please brace yourselves – blessed, as though some karmic force had taken pity on me and decided to give me what I had, in the intervening years, realised I did, in fact, want very, very much.

Throughout my pregnancy, though, I was convinced I was going to miscarry. Sometimes I would sit on the bed for up to an hour, waiting to feel the baby move; in those very early days of tiny, barely perceptible kicks, I would wake Brandin up in the middle of the night to feel them and, when he felt nothing, I would wonder if I was imagining it – if I had imagined the whole thing. What if I wasn’t pregnant at all?

A friend of mine’s dog once had a phantom pregnancy. She began to lactate and, as she seemed uncomfortable, my friend – and I quote – “milked her into this tiny shot glass”. When she finally took the poor dog to get medical attention, the horrified (I’m guessing) vet told my friend that she was making her dog think she was her baby, and instructed her to stop this milking lark immediately.

The fact that I: got pregnant in the first place; carried that pregnancy to term; produced a happy little babser with very little damage done to either one of us… It felt like a miracle. Who wouldn’t want another miracle?!

The memory of Atlas’ birth is, honestly, another motivating factor, although to what extent, I’m not sure. Does this make up 50% of my desire to have another baby? 75%? Less? More?

Atlas was delivered by C-section, not quite of the “emergency” variety but unplanned and very hurried, with little time elapsing between the moment of decision – “yes, okay, if you think that’s best, let’s do the C-section” – and the moment I was being rolled on to the operating table, numb from the waist down, all the while thinking, oh God, I’m so embarrassed, I’m so heavy, what if they drop me?

In the weeks after he was born, I struggled massively with the trauma of those hours. When I was wheeled into recovery, I began to shake violently as my body came down from the epidural. I was too afraid to hold Atlas, in case I dropped him; I have this vision of him, wrapped in a blanket, lying on his back in a little pod by my bed, all cold and on his own and not knowing what was going on, as I was trying to drink water and take deep breaths and come back to myself.

(Beatrice has since told me that Brandin was holding him during this time, so he wasn’t cold, or alone, at all, but memory is a liar and I can still see the scene – the wrong one, apparently – so clearly.)

I had read all of these books about childbirth and labour and the medicalisation of both (a bad thing, in case you didn’t know) and I had truly absorbed the messaging that stated how much better it was to give birth vaginally; how much you gave the baby, as it travelled down the birth canal; how much better babies who have been born vaginally are at all sorts of things, from breathing to chess.

I felt ashamed of myself, that I had just given up so easily, and allowed Atlas to miss out on all of those great benefits, simply because I’d been in labour for 24 hours and I was tired and my arm burned from where I was having penicillin pumped into my veinns every hour. If he never learns to play chess, it’ll be all my fault.

A second baby would be a chance for a redo. I could go for a VBAC (vaginal birth after C-section), should conditions allow. I could schedule a C-section, and be prepared for all that it entailed. If nothing else, I would know more about what was about to happen and could – I’m imagining, of course I know this is almost completely bonkers – have more of a feeling of agency over the whole process than I did the last time.

There’s also the matter of Atlas himself. I see the relationship his older brothers have with one another – they fight (a lot) and they can’t sit next to each other at the dinner table or chaos ensues, but they love each other so much. Though they would deny it, I’m sure, they are each other’s best friends.

They play games together and read books together and take baths together and get into trouble together and, though they love Atlas – so much – by the time he is old enough to do all of those things they will definitely be too old to do them with him.

Even now, I think, the clock is ticking on the question of birthing a potential best friend for Atlas. If I got pregnant tomorrow, he would be 2 years and 9 months old by the time baby #2 arrived, which is an okay age gap for a friendship. But give it another year or two and I fear they will be more likely to be rivals than friends, at least until they get old enough to stop being jealous of one another.

The final – and, I worry, most compelling reason for me personally – is the reason that conquers all other reasons (especially the “can’t afford it” reason, if you don’t worry about the actual medical bills, which I never do): we just have all this baby stuff.

As Atlas has outgrown his clothes and his toys and his swaddles and his pacifiers (as if he ever used them, the brat), I have packaged everything up carefully into boxes and vacuum-packed bags and stored them in various corners of the various walk-in wardrobes our house contains.

There is a large zippered carry-case – the kind a new duvet comes in (or came in, as I finally caved and bought the Buffy Cloud Comforter which came in a plain ol’ box, much to my chagrin) – in Finn’s wardrobe, that contains all of Atlas’ newborn clothes. In William’s, there are large bins full of baby flash cards, black and white for newborn eyes; rattles; soft-touch chew toys; and baby bath towels. There are several Pampers boxes on the upper shelves of our wardrobe, with swaddles and burp cloths and silicone training spoons and baby carriers in them.

And then there’s the equipment: the bath with its inbuilt weighing scales and the play mat and the jumper and the swing and the infant car seat and the snot sucker (jokes, I’m 99% sure I threw that out).

I kept it all, not because I couldn’t bear to part with anything – I did donate quite a few things to Goodwill, while others, things that were torn, or stained, went in the bin – but because I keep thinking, what if we have another baby?

And now that I, honestly, think we probably won’t be having another baby – even though it galls me to type it, or think it, or, worse, say it out loud, because why does Brandin get his way?! – I’m faced with the inevitability of having to trawl through these things again, and figure out what to do with them.

Doree Shafrir recently wrote about this on her newsletter, writing about “all the baby stuff that I was holding on to because there seemed to be an infinitesimal chance that we might be having another kid. And getting rid of it all felt so fraught that I just kept avoiding it”. It does feel fraught.

It also feels like something I’ll end up doing alone, and I’m not sure how I feel about that, either. That the purchasing of the baby clothes – and, honestly, the boys’ clothes, most of the time – falls almost entirely to me doesn’t bother me too much, because I like buying clothes (and I especially like buying kids’ clothes, because you don’t have to worry about sizing or whether or not something will suit them or, in the case of our children, whether or not they’ll like it, although I suspect that latter bit of peace will be shattered soon enough).

But the fact that the sorting out of said baby clothes does fall to me feels like a cruelty of sorts, like salt to the wound of accepting that there will be no next baby, no next pregnancy, no next labour and no next childbirth, at least not for me.

Maybe, for now, I can just leave all of the boxes and bins and bags as they are. Maybe this can be a 2024 problem. (Or even 2025.)