By Audrey Sanchez of Two Dogs, One Cat, and a Baby

This story begins with my period and ends with my 18-month-old begging the gynecologist for tampons…wait for it…while sitting on my chest as the doctor inserted not the first, but second IUD that week.

Before we get to that moment—clearly a high point in my parenting adventure—a little back story.

My husband I both come from large families. His family is large because of their devout Catholicism, mine is large because we’re careless hillfolk. The women in our families are hearty child-bearers and the men, virile and seemingly “adequate” lovers. My husband is the firstborn of seven, my grandmother is the sixth of fourteen, and my sister and I were born 15 months apart. As my mother says, “We breed well in captivity.”

So, you can imagine my shock when, the very moment my daughter was born—like a lightening bolt—I knew I only wanted one child.

At first it was just a gut thing. A deep-soul contentment. An overwhelming understanding on a cellular level—real hippie nonsense.

Of course, the day after you have your first child, when you tell your family and friends you’ve decided the baby is going to be an only child, no one really takes you seriously. Shocker, 24 hours after shoving a baby through your lady bits, no one expects you to do it again right away. When your hormones are crashing and you’re crying in the shower, milk leaking down your still-swollen abdomen, no one believes you’re thinking clearly.

“Let’s talk about it on her first birthday,” my husband said. But, if anything, the twelve months between the “puffy-squishy-wide-eyed newborn monkey” and the“wild-destructive-running-shrieking toddler monkey” only solidified my resolve to close up the ol’ uterus for good.

It wasn’t because of the increased activity, the teething, or the physical demands. It wasn’t wanting more money, freedom, or sleep. In fact, it wasn’t because of my daughter at all.

That unnamed gut feeling, the overwhelming contentment deep in my soul, had evolved into something darker.

It didn’t happen right away, but one day I looked up from scrubbing the baseboards and did the math. It had been well over 500 days since I had slept more than 90 minutes in a row, and I was spending all the baby-free moments I had cleaning specks of dust off our baseboards, and counters, and floor, and windows, and you name it.

There was absolutely no reason for me to be cleaning our home so relentlessly. Except I could not stop.

What had started as a way to feel some semblance of control in my ever changing and suddenly uncontrollable life had morphed into a full on compulsion. The anxiety I felt about the weight of motherhood was manifesting as compulsive cleaning. Bloody knuckled, vinegar scented compulsive cleaning.

Like some masochistic fetish, minus the fun parts. More Merry Maids, less French maid—which was super disappointing to my husband. Poor guy could not care less about a tidy home, but he wouldn’t be opposed to me wearing something other than snot stained yoga pants every now and then.

Cleaning took precedence to everything else. Reading? Not unless the dishwasher was empty. Running? Only after I folded the laundry. Sex? Okay, but not on the bed, because I don’t want to mess up the pillows.

And as guilty and selfish as it made me feel, apart from cleaning—and the eventual and necessary anti-depressants—one of the only things to alleviate my anxiety, to give me reassurance that I could survive motherhood while giving it my best bedsharing-breastfeeding-babywearing-no-village-having absolute all was knowing I wouldn’t have to do it again.

I wouldn’t have to grow a child cell by cell in my body for 40 weeks. I wouldn’t have to tandem nurse two little milk grubbers at all hours of the day and night. I wouldn’t have to forego any hope of bodily autonomy or find ways to soothe my nervous system after hours of being touched-out. I wouldn’t be staring down the barrel of additional years worth of cloth diaper laundry.

Dust could settle on the windowsill and I wouldn’t HAVE to clean it IMMEDIATELY, lest my child be stricken with some airborne contagion or my world descend into chaos.

That being said, please don’t mistake my unwillingness to do it again with my unwillingness to do it now. There is absolutely nothing I treasure more than meeting the needs of my rumpussy little toddler. Bbbuuuuttt eighteen months into her life, when I woke up to find blood in my underwear, my first thought was “Shit.”

Until that moment, avoiding additional children was relatively simple—we played it fast and loose and I avoided going on birth control. However, at one point my husband did purchase a box of sixty condoms at Costco, which in retrospect, was a bit ambitious.

Now that ovulation was undeniably a few days away, though, we had to get serious about preventing another pregnancy.

Fast forward a few days, and there we were, our eighteen-month-old child sitting on my chest as the doctor busted out the speculum. My first IUD had fallen out a few hours after insertion (neat!), so we were back for round two.

Newly acquainted with feminine hygiene products—because privacy is a foreign concept to toddlers—my daughter had become obsessed with tampons. So, it should have been no surprise when my daughter, observant critter that she is, perked up as the doctor offhandedly mentioned something about tampons.

What I did not expect, however, was full on meltdown, begging, pleading, shrieking, “TAMPONS! PLEASE! DOCTOR! TAMPONS! TAMPONS! TAAAAAMMMMMPPPPOOOOONNNNSSSS!!!!”

But I’ll tell you what…in that moment, more so than any other moment before or since—25 lb toddler crushing my sternum, legs up in stirrups—any doubt about having only one child completely vanished.

One is all I want. One is how many I can give my heart and soul to. One feels right in my gut. One completes our family.

And trust me, the one I’ve got makes sure the house stays a little messy.

This post was originally published on Two Dogs, One Cat, and a Baby.

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About Audrey Sanchez

Audrey Sanchez is originally from a town in Kansas so small it has only one stop sign. Since then, she’s called Boulder, New Orleans, and most recently Kansas City home. Mother to toddler Ada, dogs Clyde and Fancy, and cat Hushpuppy, Audrey blogs about her interspecies parenting adventures at Two Dogs, One Cat, And A Baby. In addition to the chaos that her many critters bring, Audrey spends her time laundering cloth diapers, getting ready to go but never really making it to the gym, and fantasizing about REM cycles.