Last weekend I went through about a dozen huge tote bins full of every single stitch of clothing my daughter has ever worn. I never got rid of a thing, because I’m nuts, but also because I thought it made sense to save things for any babies that came after, G-d willing.

Except, over four years later, no babies have come after. Not for me. Not yet. (Not yet!)

Oh, they’ve come for my sisters in law. I have two lovely nieces and one charming nephew, and another darling bundle is due to arrive by the end of the summer. The impetus for this big cleaning project was that one of my nieces needed more shorts in the next size up, and I was asked if I had any. And of course I did! Shorts, and many other things. I am thankful for my mother-in-law’s assistance with the process, because I don’t know how I would have gotten through it without breaking down otherwise, thinking about when my baby was an actual baby, and thinking of all the could-have-beens, and still trying to hold out hope for someday.

I told myself sternly that I could have one bin, just one, of my baby’s clothing items to keep. I actually managed to stick to that rule. Everything else is either going to go to the family for whatever they need or want, or it is going to be donated elsewhere. My husband will be pleased to get storage space back in our basement, and maybe it will help me to move on and accept some realities a bit.

Those realities include the very real possibility that my kid may end up being an only child, and a variety of feelings about that.

I had always wanted at least three children, and until the dangerous miscarriage I had in 2021 (which you can read about here), I had no reason to think that wouldn’t happen. We’ve had no real luck with conception since then, and my physician told me several months ago that I will likely need help to conceive at this point. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course! But it’s some added complexity to the situation, including consideration of how to make sure that those expenses are covered, since insurance might cover some but not all…it’s doable but hard to figure out. Rather than pursuing that assistance right now, I’ve been focusing on other things and also doing some soul searching.

This week I admitted out loud (to my therapist) for the first time something I’ve kept secret for quite awhile. It is a childish thought and I know it comes from that part of my brain that reverts to those instincts sometimes. But it’s haunted me, this thought, ever since the miscarriage.

I’ve wanted three children, because my mother raised* two.

Somehow I got it in my head, or at least some part of it, that to be a better mother than her, I had to be “more” somehow, quantitatively. It’s bullshit logic, of course – I know that I’m qualitatively parenting better than she did, and I just have the one (at this time). More kids doesn’t make me more Mom. I’m not going to win any gold medals for raising more offspring than she did. It’s not the Mom Olympics. And even if it was, while I would never be so bold as to presume I’d win any medals, I can say with certainty she’d never qualify, let alone stand on a podium.

Parenting is hard. Really, really fucking hard. Especially for people who are simultaneously re-parenting themselves. Turning this into some convoluted competition is only making it unnecessarily harder on myself. So I’m going to work on redirecting those thoughts from here on out. Whatever my uterus has in store for the world, it’s going to be okay.

*Ready for a bit of dirty laundry? I say my mother raised two children and that’s why I want three – not that she birthed two children – because she actually did birth three children. She had a baby at 16 that she gave up for adoption, back in the late 1960s. She had never originally told me about it; in fact, my father told me when I was 11, after my parents had split up. She told me more about it years later. I won’t share the gory details that span decades, because the details aren’t mine to share, but it felt dishonest to myself not to note this discrepancy, in the middle of a post about trying to reconcile different concepts of motherhood. I’ve also had enough of burying family secrets and drama and never talking about any of it; that’s never done me any favors.