But every time I look at DS, I can't help but think that he's my favourite person (other than DH!)
DW and I openly tell DD9 that she's our favorite human being in the whole world. It's only natural that DW would rank DD ahead of me, and I wouldn't have it any other way.
Ditto. DD knows that we wanted her-- desperately-- and that she is absolutely the light of our lives. We just plain LIKE her, and who she is.
But our feelings about her are much as Ivy reports, too-- plus, we had the added worry with a second child that would, if biologically our own,
likely have some of the very same challenges that had little to do with temperment or LOG, and everything to do with a bad hand of genetic material on some level. Life with DD during her first 3 years of life was downright harrowing-- it was the grinding fear that did it. We were just so continuously afraid for her safety.
It also felt like a second child would elevate DD's risks medically by dividing our attention or distracting the parent-in-charge, often at times and in ways that she could very ill afford (in crowds, around groups of kids, during chaotic events). The alternative was paying MORE attention (still) to DD and less to a sibling that "needed" us less. This is not hypothetical-- I really know a few families that lucked out and had a second child who was "unaffected" only to feel
horrible guilt for being less available and attentive to that younger child. There's no glossing over that, because it's simply the way that things are. I really feared that we'd also be signing on for MORE limitations, too-- and we had gone to great pains to give DD what she could safely have in her life. So getting rid of a beloved pet, or making our house milk-free again would have really diminished her quality of life because her life was already so constrained, if that makes sense. When you live like that, it IS those little things that matter and give you tenuous glimpses of what it means to live normatively.
I couldn't FATHOM making my daughter's world smaller than it was... that felt incredibly selfish of us. It's hard to explain. By the time that we felt that it would have been okay, it was really too late for a biological sibling that would actually have BEEN a sibling, and it would have been risky and taken medical assistance to get us there. So we looked at adoption, too, but that also didn't feel fair to either child. By that time, we knew that DD was PG, and well, that's a tough act to follow (or live with) for any child-- biological sib or not. DH's experience being the HG sib of an EG sibling was quite telling there. We
particularly didn't want the pattern of an adoptive NT sibling close in age and PG biologically-ours DD.
It's a really personal decision. No question that there are all kinds of inputs into it. In some ways I regret that we waited so long to have children. It didn't seem like we were so old (in our 30's), but it turned out that we'd waited too long. We did briefly try to have another. Didn't work out-- and what a nice euphemism for what that put us through.
As I said, the one thing that is a bummer about having an only is that all of her firsts are also our lasts. You only get one crack at parenting "4" or "13." Eventually, I learned to kind of take mental snapshots of DD at each age, so that I have a mental folder of little pressed flowers of what and who she was at those ages. I'll never live through them again as a parent, after all. That is sad, but then again, each child is different, so I might say that I "just loved 2!" and I DID with DD, but there's nothing to say that I could recapture it with a second child. So another child wasn't really the cure for my wistfulness that the time is too short, and all the more so with a PG-let, because they compress their own childhoods so dramatically. Most parents get to enjoy ages 0-18 before sending them off to college. Not true for so many of us on the forum.
