I am definitely the latter.

Moderation is not a land I spend a lot of time living in. I’d love to, don’t get me wrong, but I’m like the anti-Goldilocks: if it’s not too hot or too cold then frankly, it’s kinda boring.

I’m not proud, nor can I help it. I’m a consumer of life, a gobbler, a binger and purger of experience and books and Netflix and naps. It gets me into trouble in all sorts of unglamorous ways, like when I drink two glasses of wine to my dinner date’s one and they side-eye me until I promise we won’t split the bill down the middle, don’t you worry.

Or when I decide I will maybe start exercising a little and the next weekend I run ten miles, uphill, dragging a sled full of regret and self loathing and judging myself for not being able to eek out that 11th mile.

Or how I don’t even understand for a second what all that hubbub about a twenty-minute power nap is, because if I get into bed in the middle of the day, I’ll be damned if I am getting back out again except maybe to pee and grab some ice cream. One morning per day is already quite enough torture, thank you very much.

Or how I couldn’t just have a reasonable number of kids, even after I realized we tend to make children that are especially crazy. “Let’s have a big family!” I yelled every five minutes from the time we said I do until the last one was born on the bathroom floor, usually at Nick’s back as he ran away from me as fast as he could.

But something has shifted recently. And it’s not just that now I have Lyme disease, which I set my jaw against and vowed would not slow me down and in return has landed me bedridden–with the kind of pain and fatigue that I didn’t know existed before all of this–once a month since September.

It’s also this: I think I’m done having babies.

Ugh. Gulp. That’s the first time I’ve said (typed) those words out loud. It still feels a little tenuous and uncertain, like when I quit my job two years ago and packed up my stuff into a box and then shut my office door and slid, slow-motion, down the wall until I hit the floor, sobbing. I knew it was right but that doesn’t mean it felt right, not all of the way, not all of the time.

And I see people having babies, on TV or in my neighborhood or on social media, and I still ache deep in that place where I truly believe we are wired to ache, at least until the last viable egg shrivels up and falls away like a petal on an old rose and I can maybe finally put the punctuation mark on that chapter of my life.

But right now–where I write this in my bed with the heating pad on, hoping I can sweat the fever out of me and rejoin my family for the first time all week–and for the last six months–where I have landed here more than I care to admit, unable to consume life or dinner or even a hard candy like I’d like to, it’s tough not to wonder if even having the ones I did have wasn’t me being ME, selfish and overboard and more than a little shortsighted.

It’s not that I don’t love them–duh, of course I do. It’s more that I don’t just love them: I live and breathe them, I need them, I am them.

Except I’m not, not all of the way anyway, not right now. Right now I am mostly just sick and depressed and worried that I am screwing them up. I can remember my own mother, bedridden herself so often, yelling about how no one understood: she was sick, goddammit. And she was. It wasn’t Lyme for her, but so what, my kids don’t know the difference, not yet, all they know is I’m upstairs and they are downstairs and Daddy said they have to be extra quiet, please and thank you, cause Mommy is sick.

And Daddy, well, who knew? He can cook and clean and launder and wipe with the best of them. He’s a superhero who has worked so hard to keep them out of my way that I’m almost afraid to tell him that if they are too quiet or any more out of my way I think I’m gonna die with the missing of them. Also he is pretty much solo potty training the littlest one, partly because I am sick and partly because I can’t participate in such a final punctuation mark on that chapter of our lives without my heart shattering into a thousand pieces on my bathroom floor.

Cause that’s the thing with having babies, right? In the beginning they are needy, but the needs are simpler and even: easy to understand. They need food, they need shelter, they need to be kept warm and close and safe. I’m not going to pretend for even a second it was easy, but at least I kind of knew what I was doing. Now we have these older children, two almost TEENAGERS, and not only are their needs constantly changing, but each one is so different from the one that came before that I can no longer anticipate what they will ask of me and have any hope of meeting them halfway.

And I worry that even healthy, would I be able to give it all to them? Me, who barely has anything figured out on my own? Me, who was about as shitshow of a teenager as you could imagine?

Me, who is currently in my bed while my husband makes dinner?

So I prop open the door that he kindly and softly shut so I could sleep just a little bit, enough so I can hear them running and yelling and laughing and living. And when things get quiet or someone asks a question, I yell, too: answers from my bed, I am hoping, are better than no answers at all.

And when I get better, which I will–tomorrow or the next day or the day after that, but soon enough–and I step out of my house again and let my eyes get used to light enough to see the women holding babies walk by, I will ache at them but I also will ache for them: because I know all too well what it’s like to turn the page on the chapter they themselves have just started.

This post was originally published on lizpetrone.com. 

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About the Author

Liz is a mama, yogi, writer, warrior, wanderer, dreamer, doubter, and hot mess. She lives in a creaky old house in Central New York with her ever-patient husband, their four babies, and an excitable dog named Boss. Read more at lizpetrone.com.