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10 Pros and Cons of Having Close-in-Age Kids

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I had 3 kids in under 4 years. My three kids were so close in age that I didn’t have a single menstrual cycle for 5 years (win!!) Of course, I also didn’t have a full REM sleep cycle for about that long. As with anything in life, there are pros and cons to having closely spaced pregnancies.

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1) Pro: Shared interests. Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol, Disney pricesses, kid concerts, indoor playgrounds… when your herd is close-in-age they share the same interests. Not only does this often make their bond stronger (at least in the young years), but this makes everything from playdates to day trips, birthday gifts to vacation planning a bit easier.

Con: Everyone’s a Spitfire. When your whole crew is in tantrum territory life is a minefield. Meals out are a gamble. Religious services are treacherous. Art museums are off limits. Grocery shopping is a three-ring circus. Travel is stressful. Needless to say, you quickly learn the law of 2/3: only 2/3 of your family will be happy at any given time. The extra fun part: the pleased vs. displeased campers can (and will) change without notice.

2) Pro: No Sleep. Once you get past the first indescribably torturous month of sheer sleepless exhaustion of your first baby, things get easier. You learn how to cope with less sleep than you ever imagined possible. (Seriously, you will laugh at how you could’ve ever claimed to feel “exhausted” pre-kids.) Once you get REM sleep it’s harder to live without it. This means it’s far easier to just be tired and stay tired than to taste the addictive drug of REM sleep only to have it ripped away from you. The sleeplessness of subsequent newborns isn’t nearly as painful as it was the first time around when you’re already running on empty.

Con: No Sleep. That’s right, it’s both a pro and a con! When all of your littles are little, so is your sleep accrual. Rising feeling well-rested is a thing of the past and (seemingly unforeseeable) distant future. You may go to bed early to make up for some of the lost Zs, but you have no control over your sleep pattern.

Pro: Diapers Days. When you’re already used to buying and changing diapers, adding another bundle’s bum to the mix isn’t a big deal. Same goes for scheduling around nap routines, carrying a hefty diaper bag, being accustomed to a easy-care-only wardrobe, having a baby-/toddler-proofed home, expecting tantrums, potty-training, and owning kid-safe dinnerware.  You’re already in that phase, so might as well keep it rolling.

Con: Diaper Debt. Diapers add up… and so do wipes. It gets pricey shielding the world (and your home) from multiple incontinent kiddos. Having multiple kids in the same helpless life stage can be challenging — buckling and unbuckling multiple car seats at every destination, putting on multiple tiny socks and shoes, putting on and taking off multiple coats, wiping multiple noses (and butts) all day every day, bringing EVERYONE into the public bathroom with you, bathing multiple kids, keeping multiple mini-humans safe in public — is exhausting and expensive. If you’re formula-feeding on top of all of this… OUCH! And if you’re shelling out for daycare… my deepest condolences to your wallet.

3) Pro: Gear Reuse. When you have your litter close together, the gear is easily reusable. And, if you do what we did and have your babies in just the right timeframe, you can even reuse the carseat and base for all of them before it expires. Win!

Con: Primary Color Pile-up. When all of your kids are young, the amount of toys and gear and primary colors overwhelms your home. Every corner houses kid items. Your bathroom is a bath toy menagerie. Your family room looks like a daycare center. To the minimalist, it’s unsettling at best, anxiety-inducing at worst. It’s a temporary phase but it’s a long one.

4) Pro: Nipples of Steel. Breastfeeding calluses the nipples. If you have your kids close in age, you can maintain that teat toughness much to your benefit. The more you pump and the longer you nurse, the easier it is adjusting to a subsequent newborn latch. Every nursing relationship is different and no matter how many kids you latch on, breastfeeding each baby has a learning curve. However, the soreness that you experienced with your first nursling is unlikely to happen if there’s little to no break between your weaned and breastfed babes.

Con: Milk Machine Malaise. After a while, you just want your body back. You want to be able to put on a shirt without considering boob accessibility.  You want to go out without considering nursing/pumping requirements or calculating engorgment. You want to sleep on your belly. You want to be able to take OTC medicine without worrying if it’s breastfeeding-compatible. Basically, as beautiful and beneficial and bonding as breastfeeding is, it gets old after a while (especially if you’ve been nursing a toddler.)

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5) Pro: Mom Identity. When you are in the trenches of motherhood, the role consumes you in the most rewarding, exhausting, fulfilling way. When you have raised baby after baby — one after the other — into toddlerhood and early childhood, you are unwaveringly secure in your maternal identity. Nothing else in your life — no other role, responsibility, title, or achievement — can come close to the one that demands every shred of you every waking and sleeping second of every day. When you have multiple wholly dependant offspring, your personal identity is: “Mom.”

Con: Lost in Mommyland. When you’ve been in the mommy trenches for years in a row, you forget who you were — who you are — beyond that role. Time simultaneously stands still and rushes by when you have baby after baby. You must focus moment-to-moment to survive but, once the babies all grow older and your focus can grow broader, you can feel lost.

6) Pro: Love Abounds. When you have multiple close-in-age kids, they often adore one another and you while they are young. Hugs, cuddles, kisses… every day is filled with genuine affection. Your arms, mind, washing machine, and life are full, but so is your heart.

Con: Marriage Bombardment. You and your children may share embraces and pledges of love daily, but you and your spouse will be permanently adrift if you don’t take heed. Each child demands attention. Each child deserves affection. Each child owns a piece of your heart. But your spouse does too. However, your significant other is further down the list than he/she used to be. Every additional child increases that distance between you in every conceivable way. Whereas it once was just the two of you bound to one another in love and fealty, now you’re bookends spaced further apart by each child you have together. If you are not careful to maintain your bond and make time, love, and space for each other, you won’t last. Children are a beautiful gift that can snuff out even the brightest marital flame, if you allow it.

7) Pro: Friend Finding. Mom friends for you, buddies for your babes… the (wholly necessary) search is an easier undertaking when your kids are closely spaced. It’s hard for moms with kids who are in vastly different age brackets to relate or spend time together. A 9-year-old doesn’t want to hang with a 6-month-old, so playdates are out. And no matter how exciting Baby’s first bite of solid food may be to the mom in the trenches, a middle school mom is going to have a hard time mustering passable enthusiasm when she’s eyeing tween social media melodrama and looming PSATs.

Con: Babies Steal Time. It wasn’t until I had my third child and had a brief moment of clarity that I realized babies don’t slow down or preserve time, they steal it. Your first baby seems to develop so slowly in comparison to your second and practically backwards in comparison to your third. Each subsequent child develops faster than the last but, what’s terrifying and sad: you lose 1-2 years of each pre-existing child’s childhood with each new baby. In other words, I “lost” 2-4 years of my first child’s toddlerhood and early childhood because of babies #2 and #3, and I lost 1-2 years of my middle child’s toddlerhood due to baby #3. Why? Because while you’re focusing on your newborn — as nature demands in order for the infant to survive — you lose sight of your older child(ren.) They seem automatically older and more capable to you in comparison to the newborn. As such, they require less of your mental attention. Not until the baby gains a bit of mobility are you able to return your focus to your other children. One day, you see your youngest at the same adorable age your older children once were and realize, with aching sadness, that you missed that stage… that those memories are faded in a hazy fog of newborn sleeplessness and rollercoaster hormones. That it was stolen time. Witnessing your youngest is your only window to what you missed.

8) Pro: On-trend Bump. If you have your kids close together, your maternity, postpartum, and nursing wardrobes won’t have a chance to go out of style. Sweet!

Con: Fashion Fatigue. By the time you pull that once-loved maternity top from the storage bin for the third time, it turns your stomach (not fun when you’re already fighting morning sickness.)

9) Pro: Pick-up Sync-up. When your kids are close-in-age, at some point their school schedules will sync beautifully. They’ll, for some time, attend the same school and have one another as a familiar in-school support too. Same pick-up and drop-off times = win!

Con: Sick Time Sinkhole. When your littles are all little at the same time, so are their immune systems. That means your paid-time-off pool is going to take a hit. Sharing is caring, and kids really like to share their germs (with one another and you.) If you and/or your significant other don’t have a rough plan for navigating repeated unexpected days off and midday pediatrician visits, get on it. Kids get sick and it’s generally at 2AM the night before a big meeting. It’s all about timing!

10) Pro: Rip off the Band-Aid. When you have your lot in a brief timeframe, you limit the pregnancy, postpartum, breastfeeding, naptimes, and tantrums stage to a single block of time. You don’t exit the life season just to re-enter it again with one foot in two worlds; you are simply in it (really in those trenches) until you’re not.

Con: When It’s over, It’s Over. One day you’ll realize you’re exiting the deep infant-toddler trench. You’ll recognize the lessening stress and the availability of both of your arms. You can breathe! You’ll also realize that it’s almost over and there’s no going back. No more parent-and-me classes. No more middle-of-the-night cuddles. No more blissful sleeping baby on your shoulder. No more library story times. No more preschool parties. The door has closed, another has opened. What is ahead is beautiful but so was what is behind.

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This list of pros and cons could go on infinitely. But what really matters is what feels right to you, handling what life has handed you, and finding genuine happiness in your own life. Because, after all, we can really control very little in life, but seeking to find joy in whatever our circumstances is the greatest gift we can give ourselves and others.

Infertility Made Me a Better Mom

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Infertility broke me. It pummeled me, my relationships, my perspective, my worldview, my sense of purpose and self-worth. But I am a better mother because of it.

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For a horrendous year we struggled to conceive our first child (full story here). Invasive and torturous tests, ineffective and horrible medications, and multiple doctors yet no one caught it. No one realized that I had endometriosis. That’s right, two fertility specialists and one seasoned OB/Gyn, yet not one even whispered the possibility of endometriosis. It wasn’t until 2018 — nearly a decade after my fertility battle — that I was finally diagnosed. But, let me tell you, the sad truth: my story is all but uncommon.

Women’s health is a brutal stomping ground of dismissed pain and excused symptoms, with “hormones” being the new “hysteria.” And so it is made possible for most endometriosis sufferers to go decades un- or misdiagnosed then prescribed horrendously invasive and entirely ineffective medical treatments. (Yes, treatments, as there is no cure. Nope, not even menopause.) But, that rant is for another time. Back to my tale.

By saying that I am a better mom because I experienced infertility am I implying that moms who never personally experience infertility aren’t good moms? Hell no! It just means that I am a better version of my former self because of what I endured and, thus, I am a better mom than I would’ve been without the life experience.

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Infertility — its unspeakable, wide-reaching pains and demands of secrecy — broke me. It shattered who I was. In order to go on, I was forced to glue myself back together. And I did. I pieced myself whole — shard by battered shard — in a better, stronger, more empathetic, more unwaveringly resilient form than I ever fathomed. It was because I had been broken that I could be so tolerant of pain, so appreciative of the children I was eventually granted (even on their worst days), so positively resilient, so set on cherishing every moment and gathering every possible memory with my children. Infertility was the shittiest of blessings that I would never wish on anyone, but for which I am now grateful.

The humiliating tests that were emotionally if not physically painful, the burden of hiding my fertility struggles and surging hormones from others (especially at work… because if a pregnant woman is viewed as a liability, a woman trying to conceive is just an empty cubicle waiting to happen), the effort to genuinely celebrate others’ pregnancies and births, the strength required to face others’ fertility-related commentary and questions in a non-murderous fashion, the strain on relationships, the distain for my own body betraying me, the sense of utter failure at what should be a natural and easy endeavor, the challenge of not allowing the descent into becoming that bitter infertile woman, the disconnect of being complimented or viewed sexually when my sexual organs were broken, the impossible battle of holding my shit together when my shit was so  shredded by hormones and emotions and physical pain and mental anguish and self-pittying and somehow — freakin’ somehow — lingering hope that it would all end well. It was brutal.

Infertility made me stronger, more appreciative. In its wake, I became a human clown-faced punching bag. In comparison to what I’d experienced during my bout with infertility, I could bounce back smiling after any blow. Life could not topple me. Trauma, physical pain, emotional damage, financial hardships, lost loved ones… I would rise. I would find happiness.

Infertility helped me discover what — and who — my priorities were and in what order they stood. Infertility lessened my limiting modesty (a must as a mom, especially a breastfeeding mom), increased my ability to self-advocate, and amplified my pain tolerance immeasurably. It made me acutely aware where I did and did not want to go in my life. It made my values clear and illuminated the rubbish. Even more, just as having a challenging child or difficult baby grants you greater humility, awareness, and accurate empathy, so does a bout with infertility.

Sure, prior to having faced infertility I was aware that such struggles were a hurdle, but I had no grasp on the life-altering, all-encompassing, ego-shattering, dream-endangering affects. As with parenthood, you just don’t know what you don’t know and you cannot possibly truly understand unless you, yourself, have lived it. And once you do live it, you look back at your former self and think, “I knew nothing.”

I certainly do not know it all. I have much left to learn and live, but I will do so as a better person because of where I’ve been. I will continue to survive and savor, laugh freely and find beauty in the mundane, hoard memories and cherish moments. I will continue to be better because I was broken. I will thrive.

Happy Mother’s Day

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Happy Mother’s Day! That’s a loaded sentiment, no? The statment implies a hope of celebration for females who parent one or more living children. I’d like to nix that notion.

Instead, I’d like to wish a happy Mother’s Day to all of the moms, step-moms, moms-to-be, adoptive moms, foster moms, surrogate moms, biological moms, hopeful moms, loss moms, aunts, godmothers, grandmothers, step-grandmothers, cousins, great-aunts, childcare providers and teachers (“weekday moms”), milk moms, female mentors, and any woman who has cherished a child. You needn’t have physically birthed a child to be celebrated today. You simply need to have made a positive impact on a child’s life.

I know this day can be challenging for those who have lost — a mother, a child, a dream — or are trying to conceive (if you’re a returning reader, you know I’ve walked that path), but I hope you find a way to smile, to focus on all you have, the beauty of life, the fond memories, and positive possibilities. All who are hurting today, I wish you more smiles than tears, more warm recollections than pained mantras. I hope you can find the stamina to will yourself to feel comfort, if not happiness, today.

I wish for you to choose joy. I wish for you pleasant moments of a quiet mind and a full heart. I wish you a beautiful day. You deserve it.

My Infertility

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I was infertile. I was in my mid-20s, married to my high school sweetheart, generally healthy, and there was no reason I shouldn’t be able to get pregnant. But I couldn’t.

We tried for six months with no success. I went to my OB/Gyn. She recommended I track my cycles. I did.

A few months of tracking and trying, it was clear I had returned to my former cycle irregularity as soon as I had stopped taking my oral contraceptive. “You’re young. You’re healthy. Let’s not waste time. I’ve seen too many women have their concerns brushed off and then age becomes a factor. Let’s get you pregnant.” She explained I, for some reason, wasn’t ovulating regularly. So, she prescribed me a low dose of Clomid to spur my body into ovulating and referred me to an infertility specialist. Disaster.

Ovarian cysts formed. I could barely walk, my abdomen was so distended I appeared to be in my second trimester, I couldn’t wear anything tighter than an empire waist dress because my abdomen was so sore from the cysts, my hair started falling out, acne flared, I couldn’t concentrate, I was a hormonal wreck. Back on birth control I went for one month to dissolve the cysts. Once off of the contraceptive, we kept trying. So many negative pregnancy tests. So many tears.

2010: In the midst of Infertility struggles

2010: In the midst of Infertility struggles

I saw the infertility specialist. She wanted to label me as PCOS but I didn’t fit in the box. She sent Hubs for testing. He came back: “super motility” with zero fertility concerns. I was clearly the problem. I ran through numerous invasive, humiliating, and painful tests; all came back spotless. Meanwhile, every pregnancy test was negative. My body was inexplicably standing in the way of our dreams — my entire life vision — and I had no explanation, no solution. Even worse: I had to remain silent.

I couldn’t tell anyone at work because a young woman trying to conceive is a liability in corporate culture. Sharing that news would’ve sidelined my career. I couldn’t tell my friends or family because I considered it a private matter that they wouldn’t understand. My family had all easily conceived; most of my friends were trying to prevent conception. A few people I did let in tried to empathize but there were unfortunate statements like, “Just relax and forget about it, then you’ll get pregnant,” and “People accidentally get pregnant all the time.” I felt so alone, so “other”, and so palpably barren.

Upon my fertility specialist’s advice, we hesitantly agreed to try one more even lower dose of Clomid. I woke up unable to walk or stand for longer than a minute. I cried in pain (I don’t cry); we went to the ER (I don’t go to the ER).

Pregnant with #1

Pregnant with #1

Bigger, meaner ovarian cysts twice the size of my ovaries appeared in the scan. The emergency room physician looked concerned and said he’d never seen cysts so big. “No driving. No intercourse. Limit walking,” he said. “If those cysts burst, they could take out your ovaries.” I started bawling. He asked me why I was crying. “Because I’m trying to have a baby — all I want is a baby — and you just told me I have two ticking time bombs attached to the exact organs I need to make that baby.” He looked at me like a confused puppy and left the room.

He returned 30-minutes later. “I talked to your gynecologist,” he said, “She’s great! She calmed me down and told me ovarian cysts can get this big. She said another round of oral contraceptive should take care of them.” He tried to give me narcotics for the pain but I refused; I don’t do pain medication. Back on birth control I went. Away went the cysts. Square 1.

Another visit to the fertility specialist. “If you don’t want to do Clomid again,” we most certainly did NOT, “you should seriously consider IUI.” She wanted to artificially inseminate me.

Hub’s and I talked… a lot. I cried… a lot. We decided to take a break from the doctors and the medicine for 6 months just to see if we could do this on our own. My fertility specialist tried to dissuade us. We remained firm. “I’ll see you back in six months.” she said. With that, a big, irritated part of me wanted to get pregnant just to spite her.

I returned to my OB/Gyn and fumed about the fertility specialist. She recommended an expensive fertility monitor to aid us in our natural conception efforts. $300 poorer and one fertility monitor richer, we were tracking and trying.

Three months later, #1 was conceived. The lonely, exhausting, painful, secretive, mournful infertility battle was over. We finally had our baby. The emotional scars will never heal. I’ll never be the same person I was before. However, I’m glad. We are more appreciative, grateful parents than we likely would have been otherwise because we experienced what we did. I am a stronger person for having had my brush with infertility. Yet others have and continue to suffer more than I. I am a lucky one.

An infertility struggle and a traumatic delivery gave us #1

An infertility struggle and a traumatic delivery gave us #1

No Longer New

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There’s a baby boom and I am loving it. Friends from all corners of my life are having first, second, third, and fourth children. Me? I’m nursing my 9-month-old (and pumping for my dear milk recipient baby) while chasing after my soon-to-be 3-year-old, and my 4.5-year-old.

Others ask me, with almost the same regularity with which I ask myself, if we’ll have a fourth child. As a type-A planner, I’d love to have a solid answer, but I don’t. This baby-loving mama would adore to have one more bundle… but can we do it? Do we want to do it? I don’t know…yet.

I see my youngest beginning to crawl and saying his first words, biting me with his baby fangs and swatting at his siblings. I see my middle son lengthening, maturing, and growing fast and far away from the pudgy-cheeked 2-year-old my mind’s eye envisions him to be. I see my 4.5-year-old writing letters, getting lost in fanciful imagination games, and expressing herself with a verbal intensity I can only blame on my genes. They’re growing fast yet I seem to be staying still, just graying at the edges.

They’re no longer newborns. I’m not that overwhelmed, terrified, awestruck first-time-mom I once was. I’m still sleepless, harried, and constantly covered in one form of stain or another, but I’m no longer lost. It’s no longer new; they’re no longer new.  I know what I’m doing… sort of.

It’s sad to see them grow before me and push away, but it’s wonderful too. Do I want another newborn? Do I want another dive into that sleep-deprived, beautiful, cuddly madness? I don’t know… yet.