Postponing Oscar Wilde (Who Would, Needless to Say, Not Be Pleased)

Baby would not go to sleep tonight, and I can't take on Oscar. I know; other people whose babies won't sleep are working on a cure for cancer. Sorry.

Just a little bit about second children, I think. This, I want to write about. What interests me? To begin with: a fear, seldom discussed, but shared by many when I mustered up the courage to ask about it. I was afraid, when I finally decided to have a second child, that I wouldn't love her as much as my first one. Now the party line on this is a no-brainer. There is plenty of love to go around. Your heart expands. (Is that a Celine Dion song? Yikes.) It will be different, but equal. And on and on. But while part of me was willing to go along with this, another part of me remained stubbornly skeptical. I had never experienced anything like the fierceness of my love for Lily. There was no way, I told myself in agonizing moments, I could exist with twice that kind of intensity. And what was worse, I worried that I wouldn't be able to fake it, that this future second child would always sense her second-hand, diluted love and that this would affect her development, her sense of self.

Now I am supposed to write that the instant I met Annika, all these fears disappeared. I fell in love with her instantly, and all previous anxiety fell by the wayside replaced by this all-encompassing, ever-expanding love. Hmm. It is true that I fell in love with her instantly. There was enough love for that. And I don't love Lily more, just differently, and I kind of forgot in all my worrying that the very nature of love is its shifting over time--that it is not an "ever fixed thing" per Shakespeare (I think I am disagreeing with Shakespeare--is that allowed?) but the ultimate waxer and waner, roller coaster, cyclical, slippery thing.

Or at least it's always been that way for me; I can fall in or out of love with someone or something in an instant; my love for those I have loved the longest and most would look--if graphed--like a giant zig-zag. But I still feel a little uneasy about the way my love is being doled out, spread thin. It is exhausting, sometimes, to love. Does that sound terrible? It might sound worse than what I mean. I will back-up, or try to. I guess it's that I can still remember what it felt like to love Lily when she was my only child, and I liked the way it felt. When I think about it, the love, and even it being just the two of us, it makes me feel a little sad sometimes. I suppose it's not far out in left field to allow yourself a little mourning of a relationship that once was and is no more. But it never will be again. That's hard. And it's different now. And I will never have that kind of intense first love with Annika. It's different already, but it was never just the two of us. And it won't be. And that makes me a little sad too, in another way.

I wonder, often, how this will play out as time goes on. I have stopped, shocked, on a few occasions when it became crystal clear to me that each of my parents have a very different relationship with my sister than they do with me. I have sat in the backseat of a car as my father and Alison were silly with each other while driving somewhere in a way that my father and I never are. I have seen my mother look at Alison in ways she never does at me. It's hard to pinpoint, these differences, but I know it when I see it: the way the love is different. Not better, not worse. Different.

More on this will come....Goodnight.