THREE
By Deborah Copaken Kogan
The eldest of four girls, I have vivid memories of my exhausted mother sitting on the kitchen floor in her housedress, feeding twin infants, while my younger sister and I threw Hot Wheels at each other's foreheads. Though I love my sisters dearly—and appreciate my mother's thankless work—the bedlam of these moments embedded itself in my psyche as something atonal, to be avoided. Twenty years later, when my husband, Paul, and I were starting our family, I told him I was good for two kids tops, and he agreed.
But when our children turned 5 and 3, Paul began pushing for a third. An orphan since early adolescence, Paul had only his twin brother and us to call his own. Now, suddenly, he wanted more. I told him I couldn't handle three kids and still continue to work—but this wasn't exactly the truth. I probably could have handled it, if only I'd had a husband who up to that point had been willing to share the burden. Alas, I didn't. From the moment the children were born, Paul had disappeared into his work, and I was, I finally had to admit, furious.
We went for counseling, both together and apart. We worked—how we worked—on rebuilding the foundation of our marriage, one heavy brick at a time. Paul realized he was repeating the sins of his father, who had literally abandoned him and his twin the day they were born. I realized I was repeating the mistakes of my mother, who had assumed the lion's share of child-rearing responsibilities while my father's work had him traveling the world.
Still, we couldn't see eye-to-eye on a third. Though Paul was now coming home in time for dinner—and cooking it as well—my kitchen, I told him, was closed.
Then one night, Paul woke me from a deep slumber with a passionate "Let's make another baby before it's too late." Being a father, he said, was the thing he loved best; he wanted another chance to prove he could do it right. His speech was so heartfelt that I quickly calculated where I was in my cycle (safe, I thought) and caved. Let him have hope this one night, I thought. We'll have a rational discussion in the morning.
My son Leo was conceived that night. I was distraught when I found out, worried about what a third child, 11 and 9 years after the first and second, would do to our lives. Three was unstable, a prime, chaos! Plus, money, time, and space were already tight, and the novel I'd written wasn't selling. Midway through the pregnancy, when I couldn't stop crying, I went back into therapy. Soon thereafter, I was hospitalized for four days and put on strict bed rest, during which I experienced contractions every five minutes for six weeks straight.
Just after my 40th birthday, and four weeks early, Leo was born. Our first couple of nights together were rough, until I discovered that "As Tears Go By" calmed us. Both. Finally, we fell asleep in each other's arms just as the sun was coming up over the East River. When we awoke, "Kind of Blue" was playing, and we were transformed: Leo into an angel baby, our easiest child yet; me into a woman willing to embrace chaos.
Paul has also transformed—into the kind of father and spouse I always knew he could be. Even the big kids have adjusted in ways I could have never foreseen, the storm clouds and narcissism of their adolescence now tempered by the needs of a small baby. In fact, so fully have we prostrated ourselves before our new god, Chaos, that we added a puppy to the mix. It remains to be seen which of our new creatures will become house-trained first.
Do I miss the relative calm and balance of my two-child home? Sure. But it has been replaced by something far more layered and complex, and trying to compare the two would be like trying to compare the Stones to Miles Davis. All I know is that when I walk in from work and see my son doing his homework while my daughter practices piano while the baby sits on the floor, strumming an old guitar with a shoe, which the puppy is trying to wrangle away, I often choke back tears, realizing that 17 years from now, the notes will all be gone, leaving my husband and me alone in our home, yearning for their melody.
Deborah Copaken Kogan, author of Shutterbabe (Mainstream), will publish a novel, Between Here and April (Algonquin), this October.
