Originally published on For Me For Once

Jackson will be two soon. Samantha will be five in January. They are
the brightest parts of my life (along with my husband), and I can’t
remember my life without them. But I CAN, and do, remember being
pregnant with both of them. The time that I carried each of them was
sweet, fun, exciting, depressing, painful, overwhelming, scary,
life-changing and meaningful, all at once. Some days I look back on my
pregnancies with each of them and think “Dear God, how did I do that
twice?” and at other moments I wonder why everyone doesn’t have twelve.
For some reason I’m thinking a lot lately about being pregnant, or
rather NOT being pregnant, and how I feel about that, and I’ll tell you
why. (NO, it’s not because I am pregnant, so you can leave that thought
by the side of the road. Seriously. No seriously, knock it off – I am
NOT pregnant again. Fine, whatever. Think what you want.)

Here’s
why. Right now, Jackson is the age that Samantha was when we conceived
him. Just a couple of months before she turned two, we decided it might
be nice to give her a sibling fairly soon. I had always wanted my kids
to be two to three years apart, and I’m not even sure why. Part of me
wanted one child to be at least close to being out of diapers before
the next came along. Part of me wanted one who could at least bring me
a diaper for the other, if not actually change it. For some reason it
all seemed to center around diapers. That’s kind of jacked up, now that
I think about it. Hmm. Surely there must have been other reasons.

Whatever.
Regardless, we wanted them two to three years apart. And by “we” I mean
“me-and-Greg-who-showed-up-when-I-asked-him-to-with-sperm-at-the-ready”.

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Originally published on Milkweed Hill and Beyond.

This is often one of the first questions adult Americans ask each other when they are first introduced in a social setting. Maybe it’s the same in other countries, I don’t know. It’s an obvious enough question to ask, and I guess it’s a good way to get conversation going if you can’t think of anything else to say.

Maybe we think this is a way to get to know about someone else’s interests; that someone’s work or career can tell you a lot about who they are. Much of the time I don’t think this is true. While there are people who would gladly do the work they love for free (I used to feel this way about acting, and thank goodness I was willing to do it for free because who was going to pay me?) most people do the work they do because they need to make a living.

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