To Three Or Not To Three

So, now it's my turn.

As Lindsey mentioned previously, when I make big decisions, I tend to employ a more logical approach, looking at a pros/cons equation, balancing facts and numbers whenever possible to decide which outcome is most beneficial or has the biggest upside/downside.  I like spreadsheets because they're clean, they're obvious, and the numbers just don't lie.  Maybe it's just my inner nerd, or maybe it's something about the Y chromosome in general, but logic works best for me.  The bigger the decision, the more variables need to be considered.  Obviously, the decision of whether or not to try again after Caden was about as big a decision as it gets.  So, you might logically conclude that it would have required a great deal of mental grappling, numerous lengthy spreadsheets with pros and cons showing various weighted considerations, and lots of restless nights of deliberation.

Nope.

Before I explain, the stage needs to be set a bit.  After having two healthy kids with essentially no problems at all during either pregnancy, and after getting pregnant pretty much at will for the third time in a row, I think we kind of fell into a sense of invulnerability and of being in control of the whole child-bearing process.  Once that bubble was popped with that fateful sonogram, however, we knew just how much of a blessing a healthy baby was, and that things didn't always go the way of puppies and rainbows.  It's always painful to have real life thrust so rudely into your face, and it tends to dissipate the comforting illusion of that-only-happens-to-someone-else rather quickly.  So, in contemplating whether or not to try again, the old set of variables was flushed down the drain and a whole new set of variables presented itself.  It was a much smaller set that was basically this:
1. was I ready to go to a zone defense (more kids than parents)?
2. could I handle it if we had another difficult pregnancy/birth experience?
3. could my family handle it if we had another difficult pregnancy/birth experience?

The first one was easy because we'd already answered it with Caden, and it was really a non-issue.  All of the things on my spreadsheet (and no, there wasn't literally a spreadsheet for this decision) had remained unchanged.

The second one was a bit tougher.  A soul-crushing experience like losing a child isn't something that anyone ever anticipates, nor wants.  To deliberately invite a second such experience is either the height of stupidity, or the embodiment of self-flagellation.  In our case, there was no indication that what happened with Caden would happen a second time.  It was simply a fluke of development - it wasn't a genetic tendency, nor the result of any particular behaviors on our part.  So, the chances that it would happen again were precisely the same as the chances it would happen with any of our pregnancies (of course, in writing this after the fact, I do fully recognize the irony of that statement).  Could I handle it again?  Well, I had survived the first time, so that meant I could survive another.  And, in contemplating the potential of having problems with another pregnancy, I found that much of the fear had been taken out of the whole experience.  In some ways, the anticipation of Caden's passing was worse than the actual event, simply because of the unknown factor.  We didn't know if he'd be born alive, we didn't know how long he might have with us on this Earth, we didn't know how he would look, and so on.  And, in the moment itself, we were far too focused on that moment to really stop and think about the moment, if that makes sense.  I think we were in a kind of emotional shock, where we were able to close off certain parts of our emotional spectrum because it was just too painful to deal with right then.  We just needed to be in the moment, and the emotional processing would come later.  But, since we'd been through it and had time to look back on it, I knew how it would feel and I knew what kind of pain it would bring.  It wouldn't be pleasant, but the unknown factor was gone.  And, above all, I knew that if God brought us through the wringer once, He could (and would) bring us through it again if need be.

The third question was the one I struggled with the most.  As a parent, you come to realize that you'd gladly take on massive amounts of pain if it saved your loved ones -- especially your own children -- from having to deal with it.  You just want to protect them from every bad thing out there as much as possible.  There was no way we could take away the pain of losing Caden from Connor and Kylee, but the same concept applied in the sense that if we decided not to try for another child we knew they wouldn't have a chance of experiencing that pain of loss again.  It would be a sort of protection through prevention.  Balanced against that, of course, was the undeniable fact that both of them really wanted a younger brother or sister, and both of them were hit very hard by Caden's loss.  The potential of even more hurt was out there, lurking in a statistically unlikely but possible future...but their current pain was unavoidable, completely present, and very real.  In my mind, the question really boiled down to what would most help them heal, both in the short term and in the long term?  I confess to a significant amount of dread and turmoil about what we would say to the kids if we did have another bad experience.  I would be heart-broken to see my own kids develop the sense that childbirth is a fearful and undesirable experience, but I didn't have the foggiest idea about how to approach that, nor did I want to, so I deliberately pushed those thoughts away until such time as they became necessary.  Thank God they never did!

I once saw an inspirational speaker talking about how to achieve success.  In his talk, he related a story about how he took his family mountain climbing.  At one point, his teenage daughter had an accident where her hair got tangled in the equipment halfway up the mountain.  When they finally rescued her and brought her back down to the ground, she was hurt and more than a little scared.  The speaker's wife thought they should call it a day at that point, but the speaker disagreed.  His philosophy was that you never end a major experience in fear.  The daughter reluctantly agreed, and gamely tackled the mountain again.  It turned out that it was one of the family's more memorable vacations together.  Similarly, I knew without a doubt that we all would remain forever scarred if this had been our last experience with childbirth.  Lindsey has a very strong maternal instinct, and I know she considers being MOM as one of her primary purposes in life.  Obviously, childbirth is a key event in the life of MOM, and to have her last childbirth experience end with such fear and pain would be a wound that would heal only very slowly and with much difficulty.  I wanted very much for the kids to view the birth process as something to be anticipated and filled with joy.

In the end, I was convinced that though having another child certainly wouldn't replace Caden, and though the scars we all bore would be there for a lifetime, we would all be better off with another little bundle of joy than without.  Any life-changing experience more or less destroys your definition of 'normal' life, so after any such event you have to establish a new 'normal'.  I believed our new 'normal' would be much better in a group of five than in a group of four.

Watching the kids dote on their baby sister -- even when she messes up their puzzles, eats their art projects, and smashes the latest Lego creation to pieces -- has completely reinforced that belief.  I've lost count of the number of times that Lindsey and I have looked at each other over Hadley's antics, wordlessly sharing volumes of love, pain, and gratitude that we made the decision to try again.