As everyone’s dream dinner party guest, Jennifer Lawrence, announced that she was pregnant with her second child last week, it immediately brought me back to the days when I was expecting my son. A simpler time, a time when one offspring was securely contained inside me while I chased the other around like a scooter thief that stole my iPhone. It was a time when I only had one nap schedule to contend with, and I generally never felt like I was outnumbered, under siege, or physically overwhelmed by miniature people. A time when I didn’t feel like I was in the trenches fighting for my life as children sporadically hurled themselves at me from sofas, highchairs, and changing tables like a tiny hostile gang of flying squirrels.
The worst part about having two children is when they both spontaneously cry in tandem. For the two year old it’s because I did something abhorrent like follow her orders, whereas my one year old probably found a hammer somewhere
Probably the worst part about having two children is when they both start spontaneously crying in tandem. The subject of their ire is never the same due to their vastly different interests and highly individualised irritations. Usually for my two year old daughter it’s because I did something abhorrent like following her orders, whereas for my one year old son it’s invariably because he somehow found a hammer of unknown origins that I had to immediately seize. As they both erupt, you are thrown into the key dilemma that is having multiple children: you can only tend to one at a time. In the throes of the fits of fury you must do the Tantrum Tango, seamlessly moving from one to the other trying to calm them down before you lose the will to live and resolve the issue with sugar, television, or some other miscellaneous promise that will cost half a paycheck. If you are lucky, this little episode will happen within the walls of your own home - but usually it won’t, as children have a nose for terrible timing. More often than not it will occur in public - in some small and confined space like the cheese aisle at Tesco’s miles from the exit - right after something soul destroying has happened like stubbing your toe or your coat becoming attached to a door knob. The scene will be quiet, peaceful even, as you peruse the Gouda elbow-to-elbow with an elderly woman and trendy Gen-Z’er when... *boom* one chubby hand snatches a chunk of expensively aged Parmesan and the other child starts asking for a lollipop. Lured into a false sense of security by the apparent supermarket serenity, you unthinkingly yank the hunk of hard cheese from the pudgy fist and bat away any requests for sugar. All will be still for a moment betwixt the Brie and Camembert until both children suddenly start shrieking like car alarms. A cacophony of chaos, it rarely lasts for longer than five minutes, but, when you are in that tiny vortex of hell, all time loses conventional meaning and mere seconds can feel like earthly months. By the time you make it out of Tesco’s you will have aged by a decade. Possibly because of this, fewer and fewer people are choosing to have more than one child. Last month the ONS announced that England and Wales are seeing fertility rates plummet to 1.44 children per woman.
One thing I never found advertised about parenthood is how hard it is to try and discipline a child when what they are doing is, fundamentally, hilarious. My daughter went through a long period where she would exasperatedly proclaim “OH, FUNKIN HELL!” whenever she encountered the slightest inconvenience. While I feared the glances I might get in public and the awkward conversations I might have to have with her nursery carers, I didn’t really try to veer her from her profanity-laden path because her bouts of blasphemies brought such joy to my life that I didn’t dare dull them. Now, having two children, I have found myself at the crossroads between The Good and The Funny when it comes to small bouts of sibling violence at the hands of my son. After having spent his whole life being pushed aside, having toys yanked from his hands, and being dragged across the floor against his will, he finally snapped and open-hand slapped my daughter across the face. Due to his normally zen demeanour, this was extremely out of character for him and was, therefore, quite funny. The manner in which he did it, too, was with the razor precision of the sensei in Karate Kid catching a fly with his chopsticks. A usually calm child, he did not break from character other than to release a guttural yelp, swat her, and then continue on with his baby business. Apparently he had reached his limit of being capsized for sport, and wanted to show my daughter a taste of what was to come if she didn’t leave him with his duplo blocks in peace. When my daughter came to report the incident to me, I, of course, feigned sympathy, but then immediately ran to regale the incident to my husband, re-enacting all players as though it were the Will Smith Oscar’s slap. Since the first incident, my son doesn’t appear to have developed any kind of serious bloodlust but he will, from time to time, react with cat-like reflexes if my daughter goes too far. When he does, I reprimand him for the sake of my daughter, but do so knowing that he doesn’t understand many words and I’ll probably get to see a few more chubby hand slaps before he gets bigger and I have to actually start intervening.
In hindsight, I wish I hadn’t launched into the facts of life with a child of twenty months
Attempting to explain genitals to a toddler who barely understands basic commands was also something I didn’t mentally prepare for when I was pregnant with my second child. It didn’t take long after bringing my son home for my daughter to pose the question “WHASSAT?” when I was changing his nappy. As idiots who don’t think things through, my husband and I felt it best to just stick with the scientific terms that can be used into adulthood instead of trying to figure out when to phase out words like “willy” or “pee pee”. My husband, specifically, thought that a straightforward approach would fair us better, and while it seemed like a good idea at the time I did question our parenting choices when my daughter started running around the house naked after bath time shrieking “I GOT CHINA” like a tiny Donald Trump. She has also taken to asking other people about their “chinas” and I fear it is only a matter of time until people start realising that she is not inquiring about their porcelain collections. If I could go back, perhaps I would have used more vague and flowery language to diffuse the interaction, instead of launching into the hard facts of life with a child of twenty months.
Managing both of them alone generally feels like being put in charge of public safety during the onset of the apocalypse. Mayhem, carnage, and disarray as far as the eye can see - a Hieronymous Bosch painting that has come to life, bringing with it an ocean of cacophony, havoc, and disorder erupting before your eyes. Should you enjoy toying with your mental health for fun, then I also highly suggest adding in a badly behaved cocker spaniel to the mix to truly round out the mania. The breakfast scenes in my house are like Renaissance depictions of The Last Supper with my son in one corner, trying to leap free from his high chair while my dog tries to steal a crayon from my daughter. As I tend to the would-be stunt man, the dog gallops off with a crayola that will give him diarrhoea and my daughter lies screaming on the floor mourning the loss of her art supply. There are times when I fear that my sanity will check itself into rehab for stress and never return.
While there are many moments of despair, anguish, and frustration that come with having two children - moments that make me question myself, my life, and occasionally my grip on reality - there are many scenes of sweetness and light that I would be amiss to not mention. Most recently, my daughter has started taking her role as big sister very seriously and makes a point to give my son a pep talk whenever he might encounter something scary. For our upcoming trip to the Natural History Museum, for example, she has spent several days trying to mentally prepare him for his first encounter with a dinosaur. Given that he only understands greetings and words pertaining to food, I do not think that he has taken much of her guidance in, but he at least appears to listen while she gives him this stony-faced talk. They are also beginning to play together now, which makes childbirth alone worthwhile. Watching two tiny people that you made with your body cackle with jubilation over the absurd noises that they are making to each other is probably the most sickeningly heart-warming thing my cold heart has ever seen. Unfortunately they both also derive a lot of joy from throwing large and weighty objects around the house, and so sometimes their giggles come at the cost of mutilating sentimental heirlooms.
Despite the chaos, the mayhem, and the unbridled pandemonium - I never regret having two children. Three, I believe, would put me into an early grave, but two, I can just about manage. As a child of divorce who had no companions for nine years until my half-siblings came along, I always wished that I had someone who was along for the ride with me during those initial, formative years. Someone who can remember the houses that we lived in, what my parents were like together, and the holidays that we shared. Watching the relationship develop between my children is something I can’t really wrap up into a simple sentence - something special, intangible, and unlike anything else I’ve experienced. While I’m aware that they probably won’t be best friends for the rest of their lives, there is something promising, comforting even, in watching these little people that you have created form a bond that is independent from you. Being in charge of shaping someone’s childhood is a sacred task - to make birthdays special, weekends count, and holidays they’ll remember - and it’s nice to have an additional member of the clan to share in the experience. A period of time that the two of them can recall and remind each other of for years to come, in conversations that I am not part of, and eventually when I’m no longer here. While sometimes, as I clean the kitchen for the seventy-fifth time that day while covered in yoghurt with a lollipop stick hanging from my bedraggled mane, it can all seem a bit too much. A bit too overwhelming, a bit too tiring, a bit too frazzling - it’s usually at this moment when one of my children will loudly fart and the other will cackle with glee - and suddenly, it’s all worth it.
