My notes begin when my son is five weeks old. They’re less detailed and methodical than Charles Darwin’s observations of William, but there are plenty of them. And just like Darwin, I notice when I leaf back through them months later, I regularly mention facial expressions.
In my first entry, my father observes that his grandson “has a look just like Harrison Ford.”
A couple of days later, I pick up my son from his cradle at half past five in the morning; for the first time, he doesn’t want to feed straightaway but looks around—“smiling,” I’ve added.
That same week I’ve noted that my partner thinks our son looks “angry,” while I would classify his expression more as “worried.”
(Evidently I have the presence of mind to note that the fact that we each read something different into his expression probably says more about us than about our son.)
Besides his expressions, in the early days I mainly observe how my son fills his time and mine. I describe hours slept and hours spent awake, fits of crying calmed or endured, walking routes completed or abandoned prematurely.
Later I write about his first shriek of laughter and what occasioned it. I record when he starts dribbling and report on its sudden disappearance. His first day at daycare is noted, as is the end of breastfeeding—which leaves me simultaneously relieved and sad, while apparently having hardly any effect on him at all.
When he’s half a year old I try to put his clumsy manner of waving into words, the way he uses his upper arm instead of his forearm. I write that he manages to roll from his back to his front but not yet the other way, note the fascinated gaze with which he watches his sister.
His first steps.
His first words.
The notes don’t tell a story. They’re not systematic, not in search of bigger lines or underlying patterns. That’s not the point here: where Darwin’s motivation for note-taking was scientific, mine is sentimental.
I started it to get a grip on time.
To prevent myself from rapidly forgetting everything that’s happening now.
There’s no such thing from my daughter’s early years, no notes. I barely wrote anything down with her, aside from a couple of sporadic, hastily typed reports and lists of early utterances. I didn’t realize then how little of it would stick, wasn’t conscious of the fleeting nature of her baby phase and the fallibility of my memory. I was in the midst of it all and could hardly imagine that it would ever pass.
This time I want to arm myself against forgetfulness. And this, this changed consciousness, is one way in which the second time is different from the first, in which repetition differs from the first time.
When my son turns one, he becomes addicted to a thick board picture book of nursery rhymes. The second spread shows a colorful picture of two fish looking at each other, one orange and alert, the other blue and displaying an expression of pure horror. My son points at the illustration, hums, and I sing the accompanying Dutch rhyme about a fish who, like most fish, can’t speak and spends his days swimming around and around in a bowl.
I don’t know if it’s the tormented blue fish on the left-hand page that causes the song to strike me as so cruel and depressing. Perhaps it’s the combination of image and lyrics that does it, especially the ruthlessness of the last phrase, “Just turn around”: the command comes across as a sort of punishment for the poor fish’s speech impediment.
When, as a child, I had goldfish for a while, someone told me that these creatures have a short-term memory of only a few seconds. So it wasn’t sad, their having such a small tank to swim endlessly up and down in, because they perceived time differently from us. They lived in a continuous “now,” everything was always new for them, every time the first time.
When I’ve finished singing, my son looks at me in delight. “Again,” he says, “again.”
I sing it again. The second, third, and fourth times he seems to like it just as much as the first, as if the song is new to him every time. Or perhaps the rerun simply pleases him as much as the premiere. More so, even, because it’s preceded by anticipation.
It was around my daughter’s first birthday that I began to long for repetition. I wanted to feel a baby moving inside a growing belly again. I wanted to hold a tiny, warm body again, a torso on my chest and a little head in my palm. The security, the devotion, the stunning combination of responsibility and vulnerability—I wanted all of that again.
My longing was way ahead of my partner’s. Why, he wondered, would we put ourselves once more through the sleep deprivation, the shredded nights, the fuss and the hassle? Why would we disrupt a situation that worked and was good, the balance we’d achieved? And where would we live and what about climate change? Every day brought new alarming newspaper reports on sea levels rising, resources running out, overconsumption and overpopulation.
But I was like the main character in Jessie Greengrass’s novel Sight, a mother who wants to do it again, in spite of it all. Partly because she wants “an ally” for her daughter. But mainly because she “cannot bear the thought of never holding another sleeping baby, the agony of their eyelids, their mouths, their skin.”1 I couldn’t understand why my partner saw things differently.
So I responded to his hesitation with sadness, with premature disappointment, like a child afraid of missing out on a fiercely desired toy. The prospect of a possible rejection only made me all the greedier.
Even then, I couldn’t really have thought the second time would work out precisely the same as the first. But my expectations as to how it would be were based on how it went with my daughter: it was that experience I wanted to repeat.
Again, I thought, again.
I knew what I longed for, and at the same time I didn’t know that at all. I had no idea, after all, what this specific form of repetition would entail, didn’t know what it meant to have a child when you already have one.
For decades, social scientists have taken pleasure in comparing happiness levels among parents with those of nonparents—and subsequently, almost without exception, concluding that having children doesn’t make people happier, and in some cases even makes people unhappier than a childless existence.2
Some studies are nuanced enough to break parenthood down into two sides: it produces meaningful, joyful, and fulfilling experiences, but also a great deal of frustration, boredom, and exhaustion.3 (And perhaps one doesn’t exist without the other; if someone can fulfill you, writes British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips in his essay “On Frustration,” then they can frustrate you as well—simply by withholding that which you desire from them.4)
In any case, according to these studies, the arrival of a second child doesn’t usually increase happiness. An American meta-analysis of parenthood and relationship quality found that the more children a couple has, the less satisfied the partners are with their marriage.5 Two demographers who examined happiness levels among parents in as many as eighty-six countries concluded that each additional child made their parents a little less happy.6
It does depend when you ask parents how happy they are.7 A study of Germans and Brits, for example, showed that parents, and particularly mothers, were extra happy around the birth of their first child. That peak was temporary, though: in time, parents were back to prepregnancy levels.
Statistics Netherlands (CBS) also reports that Dutch people are happiest in the year they have their first child. The spike in happiness begins before the baby is born: looking forward to it alone creates the effect—the expectation, the anticipation, the prospect.8 What is also apparent from the Statistics Netherlands data is that a similar increase in happiness is absent when it comes to a second or third pregnancy and birth.
That might have been down to the chosen research method, as in the study of Germans and Brits a happiness spike was observed the second time around.9 It was far less intense, though; parents were approximately half as happy around the birth of their second child as they were around the birth of their first.10 After that, the effect rather wore off—a third child brought no peak in happiness whatsoever.
Me, I was euphoric when my son arrived. High from the hormones and lack of sleep and the heat but also from a strange sort of elation.
It was an elation that might collapse into gloom at any moment, and which perhaps felt more intense because of that. Maybe it wasn’t rapture so much as joy: that “strange admixture of terror, pain and delight,” as Zadie Smith aptly describes it in her essay on the matter.11
The sensation wasn’t even that different from how I’d felt after the first birth, though my delight was rather more measured this time. Because besides a newborn son, I now also had a daughter. A daughter about whom, rightly or wrongly, I was worried, and for whom it was best, I’d read somewhere, if her life remained, as far as possible, as it had been.
So although everything was completely different, we shouldn’t permit too much to change. That automatically put a damper on my ecstasy, set boundaries for my joy, formed a considerable counterweight.
Mikko Myrskylä, lead researcher of that study of new German and British parents, offered another explanation for the reduced spike in happiness around the arrival of a second child. Perhaps, he said in a university press release, the decline had to do with the fact that “the experience of parenthood” had become “less novel and exciting.”12
Or to put it another way, because repetition takes away the shine.
His remark makes me think of what happens when you take ecstasy: how after the first high you can take another hit, but the second wave of euphoria is always a watered-down version of the first. The extra dose of happiness therefore comes with a slight sense of disappointment.
I think, too, of the impression first times can make in general. I remember in detail the first time I rode a horse, fell in love, my first campfire to top off a night out. I remember the first time a boy placed my hand on his heart so I could feel how it was beating, the smell of 183rd Street when I first arrived in New York City, the epiphany when I first read Joan Didion.
I can’t visualize second, third, fourth times as sharply. The memories have become intermingled; they now refer to archetypes rather than separate experiences.
In Felt Time: The Science of How We Experience Time by the psychologist Marc Wittmann, I read that new experiences require more attention, activate the brain more forcefully, and are better recorded in memory than experiences that resemble what you already know.13 From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that the brain works this way: in order to survive, the most important thing is to notice the novel and the unfamiliar and draw lessons from it. Repeatedly being amazed about how a certain tree filters the sunlight at a particular time of day is rather less essential.
Could it be this psychological mechanism that makes most of us so partial to first times, so keen to seek out new experiences and tell each other stories about the first time we kissed someone, or saw the mountains, or went on an airplane? Is it this that causes our tendency to prize youthful freedom over the experience that comes with age, and leads us collectively to celebrate innovation and originality? That allows us to grant one another “second chances,” but otherwise largely causes us to associate “the second” with something lesser?
I’m hardly aware of any praise of repetition; I know few odes to recognition, barely any celebrations of routine.
It wasn’t the same, having a child for the second time. Of course it wasn’t the same: I wasn’t the same. I’d already done it once. For that reason, the most important factor that characterized the first pregnancy and birth was absent—namely being overwhelmed by a completely new experience.
There was something else instead: anticipation. I knew roughly how my body would behave during pregnancy. How tired I would be, how scatterbrained. How phenomenally massive my breasts would become, how round my belly; how I would bruise more easily and my skin would be even more sensitive to the sun than usual.
Those expectations were more or less met: I was just as tired and absent-minded; the changes in my body were fairly similar, with some subtle differences here and there (breasts slightly smaller, belly—how was it possible?—slightly rounder still).
Had the shine worn off, the second time? If anything, something had been added: expectation based on previous experience. There was amazement again, certainly. It remains a simultaneously fascinating and terrifying fact, the unimaginable cell division in your uterus resulting in a baby. The fact that it all works, without you having to do anything for it, without even understanding it.
But it was an amazement I saw coming—I recognized it.
I knew the birth would be different. Giving birth is easier the second time around, the books assured me, as did the midwives and the mothers who’d been there.
It was sweltering, the day the contractions came on, the air utterly stifling. When my daughter was born, my foremost feeling had been one of indignation—“Millions of years of evolution,” I’d bellowed between contractions, “and still we’re stuck with such a terrible system!”
This time I greeted the pain with resignation, like you would a visitor who had once behaved unacceptably but who couldn’t be turned away now.
Time went slower and slower over the course of that night, until it seemed to elapse only to the rhythm of the pain.
What I remember is that I longed for a number of completely incompatible things. I wished the end would come quickly, that time would pass rapidly—and with the time, the pain. I also wished I could stop time, pause it indefinitely. So that I could rest for a moment, but also to stretch out this experience of giving birth a while longer. Because this would probably be the last time I experienced it. And later I wanted something else entirely: when the midwife had arrived and my daughter had left, I wished I could turn the time right back.
Outside, the day was cautiously dawning by then, and suddenly I saw clearly what we’d brought upon ourselves. I saw that there was about to be a second child, a fourth family member. An infant asking for milk every two hours, who needed cleaning, rocking, figuring out. That in time that infant would become a laughing baby and then a talking toddler, and from there: a small child in preschool, a serious eleven-year-old, a child leaving home, on holiday, to work or to school. And then, who knew, a young guy in love, a father perhaps, a wrinkled old man with unfulfilled longings and regrets.
I was so exhausted by the prospect, by all the steps between now and the end, and by my role in it all, that I wanted to go back, undo his arrival. Too late, of course, much too late: he was already on his way out.
With my daughter, I can remember precisely the first time I saw her. Her round, red little head, the tormented yet resigned gaze in her eyes.
I couldn’t see my son very well when he was on my chest, when my sister asked over the phone if he was beautiful.
But I could hear him well enough. He screamed, deafeningly, and a lot longer than his sister had done. Longer, too, than seemed warranted. The midwife didn’t appear to notice anything out of the ordinary, nor did the maternity assistant or my partner. They quietly did what was required of them—testing reflexes, checking the damage, dressing, tidying up, calling relatives.
I tried to calm my son, gently patted his naked back, mumbled “oh” and “ah” and “come on” and “sorry,” but he continued to scream. I began to fear I wouldn’t manage to quiet him, that his rage and sadness came from somewhere very deep down. That he didn’t really want to be here, that he somehow knew what I’d wished for just a couple of hours previously.
I tried to attract the attention of the other adults, my partner and the cheerful midwife and her assistant, wanted to ask them what was wrong, what I should do, but I couldn’t make myself heard over his bellowing.
Suddenly, without any clear reason, he was quiet. And then, silent.
My sister: Is he beautiful?
Me: I have no idea. I can’t see properly.
It’s often said that you forget the pain of birth so that you can do it all again. That the same goes for the first sleepless weeks and months with a baby: that “nature” ensures we can no longer clearly recall these experiences once they are behind us. Because there would be no second children born at all if we could remember precisely how it was the first time.
That might explain why, after the birth of my daughter, I hardly made any notes, and only began to do so with my son when he was several weeks old. That in those notes I mainly focused on details and stand-alone observations—facial expressions, times, routes—much more than on how it felt, how overwhelming and contradictory it all was.
And it might explain why, when the second hadn’t yet been born, I mainly imagined a warm, soft, adorable newborn—not, for instance, the oppressive feeling of a baby who can’t be calmed, or the assault on body and mind that such a baby brings along with it; the body trying to find its way back to its original form, without ever fully getting there; the mind that feels simultaneously colonized and depopulated—two contradictory phenomena, strangely enough with the same effect.
“I often think,” writes Rachel Cusk in her book A Life’s Work, “that people wouldn’t have children if they knew what it was like, and I wonder whether as a gender we contain a Darwinian stop upon our powers of expression, our ability to render the truth of this subject.”14
Could it be that evolution imposes a stop on us mothers, a blockade whereby we’re unable to describe parenthood to the uninitiated?
Perhaps that stop, if it exists, isn’t so different from our capacity to forget.
My sister says I still share very little with her. The days we used to fight over toys or clothes are long gone, but still, she says, I keep my emotions and experiences to myself.
She mentions her own motherhood as an example—her daughter, my niece, was born after my first child and before my second.
“I thought it would bring us closer together,” she tells me one Saturday that we spend at a pavement café, for once not surrounded or distracted by our children. “I was going to experience something you had already been through, something big and momentous, something that from then on we’d have in common.”
But when she asked me how certain things had been for me—how much energy I had in the fifth month of pregnancy, what my daughter’s sleep pattern was like in the early weeks, how often she fed when she was a couple of months old—I only gave her vague answers.
“You’d forgotten everything,” my sister says.
She sounds surprised, not to mention a little accusatory. But perhaps, I think as I listen to her, my inability to give her the details she was asking for had to do with the fact that many of her questions weren’t about the big, gripping issues.
They weren’t about what I thought and felt when I saw my daughter for the first time, but about how our days looked when she had already been here for a little while.
Not about the first time she slept through the night, but about the course of the many broken nights that preceded it.
Not about the wonder, but about what came after: the endless repetition, the routine.
I speak to a neuropsychologist who specializes in time perception. We talk about children and memory. When experiences are new, he says, you make lots of new memories. If an experience is already familiar, you remember less about it. Routine crushes memories—or rather, it prevents them ever being made.
Routine also happens to be one of the main characteristics of new parenthood: the same round of playground and supermarket every time, the same tune at daycare every day, that one song that has to be sung in exactly the same way every evening. Again, again: it’s what children want and so it’s what new parents do, day in, day out, whether they want to or not.
“This new life laid down in daily patterns” is how the young mother in Sight characterizes it: “a structure ossified by repetition until I could barely remember what it had been like before.”15
(A study that followed approximately five hundred Swedish women until five years after the birth of their first child showed that mothers who scored high on what was called the “personality monotony avoidance scale” were less likely to have a second child than those who scored lower. A high score on the scale indicates the tendency to seek out new experiences. The fact that these very experience-oriented women were less keen to have a second child, the researchers wrote, might be because “life with children is seen as an existence with set routines.” This made motherhood “unappealing” to that group.16)
With a second child, the neuropsychologist speculates, you might get into a routine even more quickly than with a first. The experience is, after all, already more or less familiar, and there is less of a sense of inundation. In that case, you might forget even more the second time than you did the first.
“Do you have fewer memories of the second than of the first?” he wants to know.
I probe my memory. It’s true that the second time feels less like embarking on a voyage of discovery in a wild, foreign country, that there are some things I saw coming—his first laugh, his first attempt to shuffle forward, his first fit of rage. In that sense, the surprise is smaller. What for him is the first time, for me is repetition—at least in part.
Nevertheless, I don’t believe I’ve retained fewer memories, or no fewer than with his sister, about whom I’ve also forgotten a great deal—after all, that was the whole reason I decided to make notes the second time around.
There’s something else going on, I tell the neuropsychologist, when it comes to my memories of my first and second child. They’re beginning to intermingle.
The nocturnal feeds in the blue glow of Twitter’s endless scroll, for example—I can visualize them easily, but it’s no longer clear which baby I’m holding in that moment.
A newborn baby in a sling, on a walk along the canal, the feeling of kicking feet against my still-soft belly—it happened once in winter and once in summer, but in my memory it all happens on the same neutral, slightly cloudy day that could feature in any season.
My partner says he’s forgotten at which birth he got to cut the umbilical cord—the first or the second. (Wasn’t it both?) As far as he retains memories of a specific birth, he can distinguish by my position on the sofa: left when our daughter was born, right when our son came along. But when it comes to cord-cutting, he doesn’t have that image to hand.
Another factor of repetition, of the second time, is that things I hadn’t thought about again after the first time have come back to me.
The pain of giving birth—oh, yes, that’s how it felt.
The baby who unfurled a little more by the hour after the birth, looked less and less like a generic newborn and more and more like itself: oh, yes.
The newborn repeatedly needing to feed, my body making it possible, the attempts, doomed to fail, at discerning a rhythm to him: I’d forgotten; now I was reminded.
The sinking feeling on realizing his dependence, his vulnerability, accompanied by the elation because he was there, because it had worked out: oh, yes, that’s how it was.
I put music on and my son starts to dance, immersed in himself; he stares ahead, beats on an imaginary instrument, still too uncoordinated to call it air drums, and wobbles his head. I look at him, and suddenly it comes back to me: his sister danced in precisely the same manner, two years earlier and to different music, but with that same absorption.
Would I ever have thought of that again, if he hadn’t just done it?
He’s starting to talk, slowly but surely, and his first words remind me of hers.
I take a photo, and his gaze reminds me of a previous photo, one I took of his sister.
I scroll through my telephone searching for the image, see the second growing younger and disappearing, so that only the first remains, a couple of years younger and with a gaze that certainly resembles that of her little brother now.
Memory experts say that memories change a little each time you retrieve them—because you’ve changed a bit yourself. Memories aren’t fixed, but re-created time and again, adjusted to the aim they serve at that moment.
In that sense, writes psychological historian Douwe Draaisma, memories are “reconstructions rather than recapitulations of our experiences.” And those reconstructions are not only influenced by “who we once were but by who we have become … by the time in which memories are called to mind.”17 I remember my daughter because my son repeats something she did; I remember the behavior or facial expression precisely in the way that makes it fit.
Every memory is unique, a one-off. The same goes for repetition, I suppose now, for what happens when you experience things again. Every repetition is a new experience in itself: the expectations you have, which sometimes are and sometimes aren’t fulfilled, are new. The recognition is new. The memories that become entangled, that melt together or lead to one another: they’re all new.
And he’s new.
Of course, a lot of what’s now happening, I’m experiencing for the second time—but it’s the first time I’ve been through it with him. And he’s anything but a repetition of his sister, anything but a copy.
He’s completely himself, a unique human being.
Another new feature with the second child: how my daughter, amazed and careful, takes her newborn little brother onto her lap.
How, a couple of months later, he laughs at her for the first time.
How, in short, it’s not only a second child that has been added to our family: a new relationship has begun as well, a relationship between brother and sister. How this has been the birth of hundreds of new reasons for fear, tenderness, and surprise.
And at least as many reasons to wonder what it means to them, that there’s two of them now.