Second Thoughts E-Book

Lynn Berger

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

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 Nørhaven

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

Ask 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 focus of contemplation.

It’s as if we prefer to talk about the revolution rather than the restoration; innovation and surprise rather than the same old song. The literature on the subject says a great deal about the excitement of the first time, but falls silent when it comes to the joy of repetition.

And surely all that is fair enough: never is the impact so great, the shock so severe, as when you have a child for the first time. You’ve stumbled into the world of parenthood from one moment to the next, and once there you can never return.

But if two is the norm, isn’t it time to ask, what about the second time? What does it mean to have a second child, and what does it mean to be one? Isn’t it time to bestow words on the issue of how things continue when you bed down deeper into this new reality, the reality of family life?

*

In looking for answers to my questions about second children, I delved into the work of psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists and demographers. The empty spaces in my bookcase began to fill up, and continued to do so even long after my son had arrived. And the more I read, the more people I spoke to, the more I understood that I also needed to look much closer to home. Literally so – because experience sometimes becomes its own answer.

Second Thoughts is the result of a quest that took place in the scientific literature as well as in my own home. This book came into being because of something to do with nature, curiosity and, above all, desire: the burning desire to better understand the second time, the second child.

1

‘There’s going to be a baby’

A brief history of jealousy

During the spring in which I’m pregnant with my son, my father presents my daughter with a picture book. There’s Going To Be A Baby, it’s called, by John Burningham and Helen Oxenbury. The story begins when the main character, a little boy, is told by his mother that she has a baby in her tummy. The pages that follow depict the fantasies spun in his mind, fantasies about what will happen once the second child is there.

In one of these fantasies, the baby is a chef, turning the kitchen into a complete mess; in another the baby appears as a banker, literally throwing money around. When the baby features as a zookeeper, chaos ensues.

‘Can’t you tell the baby to go away?’ the little boy wants to know. ‘We don’t really need him, do we?’

Night after night, I read the book to my daughter. I try to gauge whether her feelings are as mixed as those of the protagonist, but she’s not giving much away. Her interest is drawn to the mother’s patterned dress, the large ice-cream sundae served to the little boy at a café, and the various names of the animals at the zoo. As far as I can tell, the main message has passed her by; it’s just the details that have hit home.

I wonder about the intended readership for this book. Who, exactly, needs preparing – and what for?

*

It might be one of my earliest memories: my little sister, suddenly there. I had just turned three at the time, and was utterly convinced that my parents were wrong about her name.

Thinking back to her arrival, it’s that apprehension that has most remained with me, the certainty that she was really called something else, and that it wasn’t in my power to correct the mistake.

In the years that followed, my sister and I mostly argued – constantly, relentlessly, to the point of physical violence, tooth and nail.

‘Your characters clashed,’ is the way my mother puts it now.

‘You found me irritating,’ my sister says.

Or maybe I was just jealous.

*

The first biblical murder – that of Abel, by Cain – is the result of sibling rivalry. Many of Shakespeare’s plots revolve around envious brothers and sisters. And in the big book of Grimm’s fairy tales, from which I regularly read to my daughter, jealousy between children of the same family is a recurrent theme.

It’s an astonishing paradox: while we believe growing up with a brother or sister to be a good thing for a child, for centuries we’ve also been telling each other stories about the ways siblings can make one another’s lives miserable.

‘For a long time I regarded my little sister as an intruder,’ wrote American author Helen Keller in 1903. ‘I knew that I had ceased to be my mother’s only darling, and the thought filled me with jealousy.’ In her autobiography, Keller describes the time when, in a fit of rage, she overturned the cradle, little sister and all: ‘The baby might have been killed had my mother not caught her as she fell.’3

‘A fat, monstrous creature had suddenly acquired the main role,’ wrote director Ingmar Bergman as he recalled the birth of his younger sister. Little Ingmar failed in his attempt to strangle the baby – his autobiography throws up a vivid image of the time he climbed onto a chair to get at her cradle, but slipped and fell to the floor.4

A friend who, like me, is the eldest in her family, tells me about an old video recording in which her younger sister, just learning to walk, proudly clambers up off the kitchen floor and wobbles towards the camera – only to be brutally thumped on the head with my friend’s clenched fist.

Can’t you tell the baby to go away? We don’t really need him, do we?

Prior to my second pregnancy, it seemed to me that the expansion of our family only held advantages for my daughter. I kept thinking of my sister and myself: of how no one has such an intimate understanding of where I come from as she does, how there’s no one with whom it’s so easy to compare notes on my parents as with her, and how lovely it is to be known, and to know someone, in that way.

I wanted my daughter to have the same thing: an ally. But now, with spring coming to an end and that ally about to emerge, my thoughts begin to reach further back. Specifically, to our childhood. And it’s there that the image becomes much less appealing, because our childhood fighting only came to an end when I left home for college, the ravages of a decade and a half of sibling warfare smouldering in my wake.

What made me think a second child was such an unequivocally good idea?

In the evenings, my daughter asleep, I click my way through a pastel-tinted online parenting forum, followed by similarly pastel-tinted parenting websites and mothering blogs. It’s easy to get lost here, in this Wonderland, where the tone switches with astonishing ease from reassuring to alarmist and back. ‘You will feel worse than you did the first time around,’ I read, for example, in a list of ‘Ten Things No One Tells You About Having a Second Baby’, and, ‘The same things that sucked before will suck again.’ Yet I’m also told not to panic, because, ‘You will be 110 per cent more chill about everything.’5

My son gently kicks me from inside. I stroke the bump as I read on.

Online, I soon notice, second children are often presented as a potential problem: they put even more pressure on their already tired parents, throw the family routine into profound disarray, and above all they provoke a series of reactions, some desirable, some less so, in their elder sibling.