By Lydia Kiesling

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos: Getty

The way my husband communicated to me that I had won my campaign to have a third child was via a greeting card when our existing children were roughly 3 and 1. The card featured a painting of a large bear — that was me! — and three smaller ones. “Three bears,” he had written inside the card with characteristic economy. I remember triumphantly texting a photo of this card to my mom-friend chat, with whom many texts had been exchanged about the relative merits of having three children.

This victory was the culmination of lobbying that took the form of many “jokes” and a smaller number of serious conversations that began shortly after our second baby was born. This second baby would lie serenely next to me in bed in our sunny room, and I felt sublimely content when I looked at her. She was a little velvety creature with a lot of black hair and very fat cheeks and tufts of fur on the tips of her ears, just like her sister at that age. Who wouldn’t want another one? My husband, who was my co-parent and the primary breadwinner for our household, wasn’t so sure. Our financial situation, good in the statistical, on-paper sense, felt rocky in San Francisco, where the state had just put the low-income threshold for a family of four at the bananas figure of $117,000/year.

And this period of intense lobbying had also been, when I look back at it, a period of great stress and poor mental health. The velvety creature and I had been in that sunny room for only a few weeks when our landlady died; her cousin sold the termite-munched two-bedroom we rented from her to someone who had $830,00 in cash. I got pneumonia two weeks after the baby was born and was functionally unable to parent my precious, rambunctious almost-3-year old, who was hating life with this interloper. I was racing through the edits to my first book and barely hanging on to a part-time web job. Our new landlord, when we moved into a less sunny place nearby, oscillated alarmingly between periods of gregarious lucidity and accusations that we were working for the FBI and possibly tampering with a classic car he kept in the locked garage.

The few memories I have from this time — really have inside my brain, don’t just conjure up from looking at photos on my phone—are mostly of things like gripping the steering wheel of a Zipcar on the way to Ikea and telling myself to get it together, or chain-smoking under a bottlebrush tree on the corner of my block while my kids were at day care and I was supposed to be working. I remember the moment when, standing in the kitchen having a serious conversation with my husband, I really allowed myself to do the math of what day care and rent cost and how our current monthly income did not equal that number.  I remember the moment when we decided to move away and my husband began searching for jobs in cities that would be more affordable. It was shortly before our move — likely because of our move — that I received the card with the three bears.

So we moved, and the third-baby conversation was put on hold while we packed up and started over in a new place. A few months later, COVID ushered in a period that not only killed the conversation entirely, but left me absolutely humbled about my innate abilities to parent the children I already had. Over the course of a year-plus of online kindergarten and extended preschool closure, the idea dissipated like smoke, even before I learned the cosmic scheduling joke that is the 8 a.m.–to–2:30 p.m. school day and the 170-day school year, or about the activities that non-infants do and what they cost in time and money. (Summer day camps, for example, are easily $350 per child per week.) I learned, basically, that a society so devoted to neoliberal economics that it refuses even to mandate paid maternity leave is similarly shitty and unaccommodating with regard to raising older children. My IUD started acting up, and I realized I had been doing invasive contraception for nearly two decades. My husband got a vasectomy. Case closed.