Second Thoughts , livre ebook

September Publishing - Lynn Berger

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90 pages

English

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A beautifully written account of a quest, both personal and scientific, to better understand the impact and experience of the second child.'There are entire shelves filled with books on parenthood, from fairy tales, novels and memoirs to polemics and collections of essays. But while I was expecting our second child, I realised that we have surprisingly few words for this particular new experience.'While every parent knows more of what to expect the next time round, the birth of a second child is no less momentous. Family relationships multiply, birth-order myths hover and sibling rivalry and parental exhaustion threaten. Yet the potential for joy and love within the family also expands, as if by magic.This new literary talent shines a tender insight on a forgotten subject: what it is to parent for the second time and what it is to forever be a younger child.'Beautifully written, deeply humane, a gem of a book.' Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind: A Hopeful History

Sujets

Sociologie, société et politique

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Publié par	September Publishing
Date de parution	15 mai 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781912836406
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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First published in 2021 by September Publishing
Copyright Lynn Berger 2020
Translation copyright Anna Asbury 2020
This publication has been made possible with financial support from the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

The right of Lynn Berger to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder.
Typeset by Ed Pickford
Printed in Denmark on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by N rhaven
ISBN 978-1-912836-38-3
September Publishing
www.septemberpublishing.org
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
- Sylvia Plath, Morning Song (1961)
Contents
Expecting
Prologue
1. There s going to be a baby
A brief history of jealousy
2. Bad is stronger than good
On the birth of the second child and the resilience of the first
3. Again, again
On the joy of repetition and the wonder of reminiscence
4. A fly buzzing around my ear
On siblings and only children
5. A pack, a tornado
Scenes from a family of four
6. Thou shalt not compare
How we measure our children against one another
7. Typical second child
On the myth of the birth order effect
8. Shall we read a story together?
What parents do differently second time round
9. Time is a currency
Raising children costs time, but whose time?
10. Long days, short years
How children transform time
11. The siren song of the easy baby
On whether we have children and how many
On expectations
Epilogue
Afterword and further reading
References
Acknowledgements
Expecting
Prologue
A sk a person why they want to have a child, and the answer will probably involve a nebulous tangle of deep longing, curiosity, and something to do with nature .
Ask why they want another, and the response tends to be rather more straightforward. You have your first child all for yourself, I was told when big and round and heavily pregnant, but you have the second one for the first.
We were sitting on the edge of the sandpit then. It was summer, and my daughter was busy with buckets and spades. I cannot remember any more who it was exactly who told me so. My own mother, perhaps? What I do remember is the effect those words had on me: my head spun with questions great and small, and I began to feel a little queasy.
Eight months previously, we d been sitting in the bathroom, me on the toilet, my partner and daughter on the cold tiled floor. It was five days to her second birthday. I d placed the test by the basin, the window face down for extra suspense. A minute s wait.
When I turned the stick over, it told me what I really already knew, what my body had already realised.
My partner smiled, sheepishly, as did I. I think we were both looking for the appropriate response, one that would do justice to the enormity of the revelation - but my daughter was growing impatient. She wanted to go outside, or at least move on to the next thing. To stretch the moment out a little, I took a quick snapshot, hasty and somewhat blurred. In it, my partner is holding the test up in one hand while his other arm lies protectively around our daughter s waist. She s frowning into the camera, one pudgy little arm cast dramatically against her forehead.
The test, of course, meant nothing to her. But projection has always come easily to me, and when I look at that photo now I can still detect something more ominous in her expression than a toddler s waning interest. Irritation, perhaps, at what we d done, or anxiety at what was about to happen.
*
What was about to happen, to us, was far from exceptional. Where the average Dutch woman had four children around 1860, a hundred years later that was down to three. And after 1970 the number dropped below two.
Since then, for a number of reasons including female emancipation, birth control and the state of the economy, women have continued to postpone motherhood by small increments and the number of large families has continued to shrink. Nevertheless, one thing has remained constant for the last half-century: two is the norm. Of the Dutch people who actually have children, the majority desire and achieve a standard family with two children. 1 As in lots of other European countries, as well as in the US for the moment, a two-child family is both an ideal and, for many, a reality. 2
After all, as a friend of mine once irreverently summed up the going consensus, An only child is a lonely child.
We, too, were on the brink of becoming a standard family. The countdown had begun, the countdown to the norm. (And the norm, I realised, was a privilege. Even if a family unit with two parents and two healthy children was the most ordinary thing in the world, it certainly wasn t to be taken for granted.)
*
My second pregnancy was planned and very much desired. Like many parents, I wanted my daughter to have a brother or sister, a playmate and an ally. I had more selfish motives too. I wanted to experience the adventure anew: the transformation of my body, a freak show with myself in the lead role, along with everything that would follow. Holding a newborn baby, the wonder at their unfolding, getting to know that new creature.
Like the first time, the discovery, or confirmation really, that I was pregnant left me elated and excited. I recognised the nervous tingling you get when you ve said yes to something big, whose consequences you can t fully fathom - along with the thrill of possessing knowledge that, to the rest of the world, is still a secret.
In contrast to the first time, however, the excitement pretty soon made way for thoughts and feelings I hadn t anticipated.
While somewhere deep within me my son was starting out on his stunning evolution from tiny clump of cells to prehistoric creature to foetus, I began to wonder what his impending arrival would mean precisely.
What did it mean, for my partner and me, to have a child for the second time ? Why did we want a second child at all? Our first had been nothing less than a miracle, an event without precedent, but what did that make our second? A repetition? A perpetuation? A trip down memory lane?
What did it mean for our firstborn, that soon she would no longer be the sole recipient of our time and attention, no longer the only object of our affection?
And what did it mean for my son, to be born into a family that already existed, that had already found its modus operandi, and therefore couldn t or wouldn t revolve around him alone?
My son s movements first became perceptible at winter s end. They began as vague vibrations from deep within, faint like the underground signals emanating from an earthquake hundreds of miles away. Soon they turned into caresses, and those caresses became the unmistakable somersaults of a miniature human being.
Don t worry, those somersaults seemed to say: I m moving, I m alive, I m on my way.
I had been looking forward to this quickening, but the sensation wasn t purely reassuring. I noticed that I spent less time observing his stirrings than I had done with his sister. The reason, of course, was that self-same sister: she distracted me, consumed my time as well as my thoughts, and in all her childish innocence utterly exhausted my energy reserves, substantially diminished as they were by pregnancy.
My son hadn t even been born yet, and already I was giving him less attention than I would have liked.
You have your second child for your first. By the time I heard that phrase, in the summer by the sandpit, I had no trouble identifying the unease it engendered. In fact, wasn t the big question what the firstborn would get out of it, exactly? As for what the expansion of our family would do to our actual family life, again I had no idea. And the precise effect on the second child was similarly uncertain.
Only long after I d embarked on my maternity leave, and it had grown so hot outside that staying indoors seemed the only option, did it occur to me that certain assumptions lay at the foundation of my thoughts and feelings about my second pregnancy.
The assumption, for instance, that a child is better off with a brother or sister than without. But also that with the arrival of the second, we were not just giving our first child something; we were taking something away as well. And there was the assumption that our second, who would never experience the exclusivity of which we were about to deprive the first, would start out with a 1-0 disadvantage.
Second place, consolation prize, runner-up.
Those beliefs had to come from somewhere. It seemed to me that it must be possible to find out where they had originated, and to what extent they were justified.
I couldn t understand how I d failed to consider these assumptions before. But isn t it always the way? You think you know what you re doing, only to be surprised by the discrepancy between concept and execution, between idea and reality? And isn t experience, often, a prerequisite for reflection, so perhaps you only wonder what things mean when you re slap bang in the middle of it all - when there s no way back?
*
There are entire shelves filled with books on parenthood - from fairy tales, novels and memoirs to polemics and collections of essays. I have a pretty good line-up in my own bookcase. But while I was expecting our second child, I realised that we have surprisingly few words for this particular new experience. Most reflections on parenthood are about the wonder and inundation occasioned by the birth of a first child - on the transition to parenthood. What happens when another comes along is hardly ever the f