Babies Galore

Ok, time to break the news - we're having an addition to the family sometime in October, and looking forward to a Bojjandi (that's a new baby, to you folks not well-versed in baby-ese) joining Chubbocks and Puddi in their revelry!

Whenever I visualised a family of my own, as I was growing up, I always saw one with three kids. Of course, I had no idea of all the hard work that went into being a mother, so when I invented stories for my cousins or sister, they all involved families with several children, one memorable series called 'jimmy-annie-lucy' having 16 cousins in all!

A was pretty clear that we were only going to have two kids, and as it turned out, by the time we got married, we were much older than the average in India so I more or less agreed with him ( chiefly less, as we shall find out!).

Our first child was an accident, of course, as are most first children. In fact, that was a time when a and I were so stressed out at new jobs and so tired that we joke that Chubbocks was an immaculate conception. We were the dumbest as well as the most stressed out bunnies in the forest, so I remember having all kinds of symptoms ( except for the morning sickness) that should have told us what was going on - an aversion to strong-smelling food, a tiredness so extreme in normally bouncing-off-the-walls me that I would come home from work, head straight for my parents home and collapse while dad cooked the evening meal for us - those were our pre-cook and maid days. Finally, we tumbled to it and home-tested and went in to see a doc recommended by a friend of mine who took one look at my face and said, "Your face is telling me you're expecting", though she proceeded to make a human pin-cushion of me nonetheless, to confirm the fact.

A was overjoyed - he'd been waiting to become a father for years. I on the other hand was more apprehensive and unsure if this was the right time, what with a new job and all. Eventually, of course, we figured there was no 'right time' and went on to have Chubbocks.

The second time around, the grand plan was to have a sibling asap, i.e. be expecting the second one by the time Chubbocks celebrated his first birthday. What we hadn't reckoned on was the extreme tiredness brought on by sleepless nights, so Puds took a while and some trying before she finally condescended to join the merry throng. I remember realising I was expecting much before any confirmation of the fact, because my skin and hair started glowing from day one. One day I happened to be at a marketplace and I was suddenly hit by such strong hunger pangs that I had to make a beeline for the nearest McDonalds and scarf down two McAloo Tikki burgers and a shake before my legs would agree to stand up straight. That's when the certainty overwhelmed me, and I hardly needed the line on the home test to confirm the news. a was away in Bombay and I remember calling him as he was boarding the flight back to gleefully announce the news.

This time around, we had gotten a little more sense than the first and second times so we had an inkling pretty soon that I was thataways again! It isn't planned and was a shock since it was despite precautions - but as anyone who's seen the serial Friends knows - they're only 99% effective - it says so on the box. We put off actually home testing, mostly because we were in denial. Life was finally pretty smooth, A had a new job, my job was going well, the two kids were settled down and we were starting to have a social life again as well as hoping to add back a huge chunk of income into the kitty as soon as we toilet-trained Puddi and stopped buying diapers.

Finally it got to a point where we had to have the home test. When the line turned pink, I had severaly mixed feelings as did A. We weren't sure we were ready to take this on now. And yet, after having experienced the joys of parenthood and seen what we create together, it was hard to go the other way. The arguments raged back and forth. On the first night, A spoke about hard practicality - the loans we had to repay, the financial and the time cost, the fact that we already felt we had too little time for the things that mattered and that this would add one more to that list. Manageability of life in general. I spoke on the soft side - how much joy our kids had brought us already, how much more one more could add, how I felt that the news was like God giving us a precious gift and us turning it away...I could almost picture Chubbocks or Puddi knocking at our door and us firmly slamming it shut and saying, "there's no more room".

The next day, at the doctor's, she started to give us a long list of do's when I said, voice quavering, "We're not sure what we're going to do about this yet." She told us about the options, and the words sounded harsh and discordant - dilation, curettage. I could imagine a sharp steel scalpel scraping away at a baby's tender body as she said it. That evening the ultrasound confirmed what we already knew and again as I told the technician that we weren't decided as yet, I felt the lines of my face wobbling over into that fighting-tears expression.

The next few days were incredibly busy for me - I had a morning to night event of my firm's every day. We had to decide by the end of the week.

The second night after we knew, the arguments shifted tracks - I argued on the practical side and A argued on the soft side. I called my sister to get her opinion. She lives in the US and has one child and I know from her how hard it is to cope with childcare there. She said that frankly she wouldn't be able to go through with it for the same host of practical reasons. I spoke to my soul-sister who'd gone through the same decision point and had decided not to go through with it. She said she had asked her elder daughter who had pointblank said that she didn't want any more siblings and that had been the final clincher, apart from the fact that she felt she wouldn't be able to love a third baby with the same intensity. We checked with Chubbocks who most amiably said he would like another sibling - a sister that he could take care of as well as Puddi or a brother so that both of them could look after Puddi. Stymied again!

The next day, by serendipity or cosmic alignment, I got a call from a friend of mine - the only one with three kids. She was in town and wanted to meet up, so during a break at the event, I dashed over to her place. her take on it was completely different - She said, the money will come from somewhere, we are fortunate to be so placed in life, but that both she and her husband felt they would have really regretted it if they hadn't gone in for a third child, and that they were debating having a fourth. Her eldest is 10, so she said, in 10 years time, both the elder two may be gone out of the house, but the youngest will still be at home. And she said a third baby wasn't one-third more work as we would expect, because everything was already set up for two kids so it was a marginal add-on in terms of organising and managing life.

That night when I went home, both A and I sat down and discussed the issue threadbare. We realised that all the hard stuff - money, time, jobs - were uncertainties in life. But what was certain was the amount of love we would feel for the third one and the amount of joy we would get out of him or her. We wondered when we had gotten so big in life that we could ignore God's whisper. And A produced our clincher - about 7 years ago, in a course at business school, I'd had to write an interview with myself 25 years into the future. And even in that, I had imagined myself with three children. We decided to go right ahead with the third baby. And as soon as we felt we had taken that decision, such a sense of peace, relief and joy came over us that we knew we had taken absolutely the right decision.

My sister produced the final winning argument the next day, if we had needed one - she'd shifted to the pro-baby side, and my BIL had always been on that side anyway. "There's nothing practical about having a baby. If you had to decide on that basis, you wouldn't want to have even the first one. And you know you can count on all the soft stuff, while you can't say the same for the practicalities."

So here we are, all set for baby number three. We've chosen to go with the soft certainties instead of the hard uncertainties, because in life, I believe, you have to believe in the soft stuff - love, belonging, kids, ideals - or what else is there?

As for Chubbocks, we checked back in with him: So do you want a boy or girl?
C: Whatever God gives us we will be happy with it!