The Six-Year Maybe

Down the Rabbit Hole on Having a Second Kid

Danielle M.

Feb 17, 2026

On a quiet, slightly impulsive afternoon in January, I pulled my Five-Year One-Line-A-Day journal from my bookshelf.

Small, teal blue, with gold-rimmed pages now dulled by dust, it had sat untouched for years.

I told myself: now or never. Start writing in it again, or let it go.

I decided I had to at least peek.

The first written entry of my only previous attempt was January 8, 2020, and the last came just a few months later, in May.

As I skimmed the sporadic entries, it hit me:

2020 was six years ago.
My sons are six years apart.
My older son, R, was two then.
My younger son, L, is two now.

Six whole years had passed without me touching this book, and here I was again with a newly turned two-year-old. A truly sweet, wild, curly-haired, big-cheeked, chunky, funny, silly two-year-old—just like his brother was.

I am back to learning ever-changing toddler rhythms, decoding the cutest babble, managing (thankfully sporadic) tantrums, and tracking current obsessions. For R back then: trucks, trains, the Beatles. For L now: dinosaurs and a rotating cast of Disney princesses.

Except this time, I am living a completely different life.

Not in Brooklyn, but by the beach. Married ten years, not four. Not thirty-six, but forty-two (which makes thirty-six feel soooo young, guys). And somehow I also have an eight year old?! I am a mom of two?!

Opening the journal felt less like flipping pages and more like slipping through the looking glass, where certain details felt eerily familiar and others had radically shifted under my feet.

The surface-level comparisons were easy to see, and frankly, welcome.

Naps, for example.

R had been a champion napper. I wrote “three hour nap!” multiple times, like it was thrilling but also kind of normal. L has never slept that long in his little life, except maybe once when sick with a fever. His naps are more like forty-five minutes on a good day. (I joke that L is a perfect angel in every category except sleep, which feels like a decently fair trade, but I would still accept a two-to-three-hour miracle every now and then, thanks!)

Then there was the weather. I took R to the playground in winter 2020 at least four times, which feels truly impossible now. This winter has been so icy and windy and aggressively cold that L has barely been outside for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch, and some days not at all.

Same month, same age child, completely different reality.

It was oddly satisfying to confirm that yes, this winter really is harder than other winters. And yes, caring for a kid who barely naps is objectively more intense than caring for one who sleeps for hours.

That felt like a complete enough trip down the rabbit hole for one dusty peek.

And then I turned the page.

Wednesday, February 12, 2020:

Therapy. Stayed an extra 25 mins just chatting. Ready for 2nd kid. Keep what I know I need, even if there is a break. The hard part is not forever.

Oh.

Oh shit.

That line hit me right in the gut. I had to read it twice.

Ready for a second kid.

And just like that, the floor dropped out. The rabbit hole cracked open beneath me. I was falling, twisting, spinning, into the long, winding, wayward path that brought me here.

Reading it dropped me straight back into my January 2020 body: a thirty-six-year-old Brooklyn mom of a two-year-old, just emerging from survival mode.

I remember that therapy session. It felt like fucking victory. My shoulders had finally dropped, like I could actually breathe again. The postpartum anxiety that had been buzzing in my nervous system had quieted enough for me to imagine a future where I wasn’t constantly bracing for impact. I felt more at home in my body, more like myself in my skin. Like I’d just rounded a corner I had been desperate to reach.

I wasn’t one hundred percent sure about a second child.

But for the first time, I could picture it without panic.

And then, two months later, the world shut down.

The pandemic hit. Fear flooded back in. That fragile steadiness I had just begun to trust cracked right beneath my feet. Any talk of a second child was immediately shelved. I could not imagine adding more uncertainty to a moment that already felt like way too much to hold.

It took two more years for the question to really resurface.

And even then, I was deeply ambivalent.

I had been ambivalent about having a second the whole time.

Not for a week, or for a season, but for years and years and years.

I always knew I wanted to be a mom. I knew I wanted one. Anything beyond that felt like pushing my luck. I used to joke, “When you win the lotto, you stop playing,” and I meant it. I adored my son. He was healthy and strong and heartbreakingly sweet. I had a (mostly) easy pregnancy and a (mostly) easy birth. Who was I to ask for more?

I could see the three of us as a nimble little trio in a wildly expensive city, building a full life together.

Two parents, one kid—we’d never be outnumbered. We’d have the time, energy, and money to put everything we could into him.

There would be enough money to travel, enough bandwidth to not feel constantly stretched thin, enough space for him to grow—and for us to keep growing too. I could reclaim my hobbies, my free time, my sense of self. Quiet moments, pockets of non-obligation, a little freedom—all of it would feel possible with one child in a way it never could with two.

And then, on other days, sometimes even later that same day, I would feel the quiet pull.

I’d find myself reading every article I could about making this decision, lurking on one-and-done message boards late at night, scrolling as if a hidden answer were buried somewhere in the comments. I was hunting for the holy grail post, the one stranger on the internet who could articulate my exact internal landscape and finally, mercifully, tell me what to do.

Should we have another??

Back and forth. Back and forth. For years.

I honestly could see myself happy in either scenario, and I also knew that either choice would contain some loss.

Some days I felt fiercely protective of our equilibrium. I loved that life felt manageable, finally. We did the big, scary thing and had a kid. That’s more than enough, right?

Other days I would watch him move through the world—so sweet, so, so funny—and think: he would be such a good big brother. He would absolutely thrive in that role. Any sibling would be the luckiest to have him.

He asked for a baby sometimes. Not constantly, but enough.

We’d read books with siblings in them, and I would feel this unexpected ache. When the story showed brothers sharing a room, or sisters on an adventure, I’d glance at him and wonder if he was thinking the same thing. He noticed how his friends had siblings. “It’s like they have friends who live in their house!” he said, impassioned.

And if I’m honest, I ached for it too.

The door never quite shut.

The soft maybe lingered.

The possibility hovered at the edges of everything.

I didn’t know whether to save the tiny pajamas, the wooden toys, the well-loved board books with chewed corners.

Was this the last time I would read Goodnight Moon at bedtime? The last time I would carry the weight of my child on my hip? The last time I’d hear, “a gwass of wawa pwease, mama?” The last time I’d be pulled into some elaborate action-figure rescue mission, my body bending to his wild imagination?

Was this really it? My only time?

I lived inside that question longer than I ever thought possible, every day stretching, bending, refusing to resolve.

In 2022, with forty on the horizon, I finally said: okay. Let’s try. If only to stop the mental gymnastics that had been somersaulting through my brain for years.

I got my answer fast. I became pregnant almost immediately.

And then—I was not.

Thirteen weeks of nausea, food aversions, exhaustion, and one bad test after another. From the start, it felt doomed.

I cried twice—two guttural, primal cries. Once in the car when the doctor called with the first bad result, and again a few weeks later when the worst was confirmed: Trisomy 13, a genetic condition incompatible with life. We scheduled a D&E for the following week. Her heart had already stopped, which I experienced as mercy. The procedure was called TFMR: Termination For Medical Reasons. I was in and out in a morning.

And then it was over.

I was officially one-and-done.

And honestly, I felt relieved.

I had tried. I had my answer. I could finally shut the door.

What I mostly felt, after the physical recovery, was overwhelming gratitude. I lived in a place where care was safe, legal, and compassionate. I was okay. My husband was okay. My five-year-old was okay. Actually, we were more than okay. We were the luckiest people in the world. We had each other. I was already a mother. My cells had already changed. My priorities had already shifted. My identity had already been rearranged.

I knew, deep in my bones, that this was enough.

And of course, the universe laughed.

The following spring, in a complete surprise, I became pregnant again.

I joke that L fully forced his way here—we absolutely did not plan for him—and he arrived strong as an ox. No bad tests. No ominous phone calls. Another (mostly) easy pregnancy, and somehow an even easier birth.

Six years later, almost to the exact date, I found myself a new mom again.

And it was the most healing experience of my life.

I felt calm and steady in a way that honestly shocked me. I was confident and grounded. There was a wisdom in my body that hadn’t been there before.

With my first, becoming a mother had felt like an earthquake. The tectonic plates of my identity split and shifted. Everything familiar rearranged itself.

This time, the ground was already broken in.

I didn’t have to survive matrescence the same way. I was already a mother. The existential unraveling had already done its work. I knew the long nights, the panic spikes—and how to ride them out. I knew how time bends and stretches and eventually softens.

The terrain was familiar.

And that made all the difference.

The six-year gap between my boys has been both wonderful and challenging—which, I suspect, is true of any age gap.

R will do absolutely anything to make his little brother laugh. He goes full slapstick: dramatic falls, absurd voices, total physical commitment. L, in turn, wants to do everything his big brother does—for better and for worse.

I catch them sprawled across the couch or on the floor “reading” together. They leap from cushion to cushion on their play couch. They shut the bedroom door and have brothers-only dance parties. Whole worlds happen in there that I’m not invited into, and I absolutely love it.

In some ways, it’s easier than I could have imagined.

And in other ways, having a second child has required real sacrifice.

I left full-time teaching to be home with him. We took a financial hit. Travel is on pause for now. We left our home in Brooklyn and rerouted toward a more family-centered way of life.

There are days when the noise of two brothers ricocheting off the walls feels utterly crazy-making. Times when I realize I haven’t had a full thought—or an uninterrupted conversation with my husband—in weeks. There is less margin, less quiet, far less illusion of control. And a lot more gray hair.

The trio life would have been simpler, cleaner, more contained.

But.

I don’t regret a single inch of the path that brought us here. Not the anxiety, the ambivalence, or the years of back-and-forth. Not even our baby in between.

I am deeply aware that with slightly different timing, different choices, one microscopic shift, I would not have these exact children.

And I am extremely attached to these specific humans.

I watch their bond forming in real time—the tenderness, the protectiveness, the love, and yes, the first sparks of bickering, arguing, and pestering. I see a pair of brothers, and sometimes, with quiet awe, I think: at least I did this one thing right.

One night R said to me, very seriously, “Mom, I just realized L is going to be my brother forever. Like, when I’m a grown-up, he’ll be a grown-up, and we’ll still be brothers.”

Yes, I said. Exactly.