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Rand and Larkin

The other day Molly was visiting her mother and mentioned she had some news. "You're pregnant!" her mom burst out. It wasn't anything like that, but that's how people think. Have one child, soon you'll have another.

In fact, Molly and I have been talking about whether we in any conceivable way might want to, you know, conceive again. These discussions began haphazardly. Molly was tired of taking the pill. What did I think about getting a vasectomy? she inquired.

No thank you, I said, but thanks for thinking about me!

Well, in that case, she asked, should she get her tubes tied?

It turned out I felt pretty strongly that neither of us should relinquish his or her fertility. "You never know what life will throw at you," I said, "or what you'll want five years down the road."

"Five years down the road?!" Molly laughed. "I'm 41, and how old are you?" She repeated her wish to stop taking the pill; she'd been on it more than half her life, enough was enough.

"So go ahead," I said. "Just stop."

"OK, and then what?" She looked at me. "Are you saying you want another child?"

"I dunno. Do you?"

Suddenly there we were. And both of us ambivalent as could be.

To my mind there are two big reasons to go for another. A sibling would give Larkin a steady playmate (and give us a break.) Molly and I both grew up in three-child families, and we loved the busy, fun-filled, contentious quality of daily life with brothers and sisters around. It helps you learn to deal. And believe me, there are plenty of times when Larkin could stand being reminded that she's not the only person in the world.

The second reason is more abstract. Recently my sisters and I met on the birthday of our mother, who died in 2006, and drove to the seashore town where we grew up. After a stop at our old favorite grinder shop, we headed for the beach. It was a gray cool breezy fall day, and the three of us sat on the sand and ate our sandwiches and told stories about our mother, our family, and our childhood.

We've done a lot of this these last two years, keeping the past alive for each other and the memory of our mother as well. This kind of sibling consolation becomes crucial in midlife, as the losses pile up. And though I know this sounds morbid, someday Molly and I will be gone, and Larkin will miss us. She may be twenty-five years old, or she may be forty-five or even older, but the day will come, and then she will really need to feel she's not the only person in the world. What she'll discover is that nobody cares about your family the same way your family does: no one else knows the stories; no one else was there. I find I can face the thought of my own extinction more easily than the thought of my daughter being alone that way. It's a powerful argument for trying to fetch her up a sibling.

On the other side of the ledger, there are plenty of reasons not to try, and almost all of them have to do with numbers. Start with the number of hours in a day. We need more! Molly and I already feel we're running at full capacity. (I can hear parents of three or four kids scoffing, but it's true.) The other important number is the birthday I just had: 50. Even if Molly got pregnant three months from now, I'd be 52 at the birth of Larkin's sibling – and 70 at his or her high school graduation.

This isn't just actuarial anxiety on my part. It's also a fact of the body — the truth my body tells me when I bend to get down on the floor with Larkin and find I'm using her little chair as a crutch ("Why you groaning, Dada?"); or when I hoist her up onto my shoulders and find myself saying a silent thank-you to my back for not going out on me again. Most days, I feel I'm just too old to start this again. As for Molly, when she told her OBGYN she was going off the pill, the woman questioned her closely. "She more or less implied it would be irresponsible for someone my age to get pregnant," Molly reported later. "She basically scolded me."

Let me confess here that these reflections aren't entirely theoretical. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that after Molly went off the pill, we shared a couple of uncontrolled episodes — emboldened by the knowledge that it took us two years (plus several boosts from the medical-fertility industry) to get pregnant last time; and, perhaps, by an underlying feeling that if it does happen, OK, so be it. And that's why Molly is right now in the bathroom, unwrapping the home-pregnancy test I got at the drugstore last night, and I am sitting here at my desk, awaiting the news. The drama of a home pregnancy test is unlike anything else. Think about what hangs in the balance. Two paths diverge from that little white plastic stick. One stripe, or two? It's moment-of-truth time. So what do you really want, my man?