While Dahlia Is Dancing

I keep harking back to a snapshot from an afternoon which encapsulates much of the giddiness and longing and ambivalence that for me permeates the "one and done" question.

Dahlia is dancing in a tutu from my second grade dance recital, its orange, green and pink ruffles now rediscovered and tugged over her fleece monkey pajamas, rustling around her wiggling butt. At her insistence and my pleasure, I too am wearing a tutu-a can-can skirt from junior high dance class, pulled up over my jeans. "Ballet music" (Tchaikovsky) is playing as she twirls and jumps between the pocket doors to our bedroom. When I first saw this house, I imagined these doors would make a perfect proscenium for living room performances. We spin together, and wave our hands like the mice in the Nutcracker video that has become her most recent obsession. "All fall down!" she yells and, joined by an oversized monkey doll and a stuffed bear, we tumble into a giddy pile together, her green eyes twinkling, her blonde mop tickling my nose. I tell myself to remember this. Then I look at the clock, realize the workday is in full swing, and scramble up to check my email.

There I see a note from a demographer. If I can call him now, he's free for an interview for a story I'm looking into. I bellow downstairs for myJustin to abandon his paperwork in favor of the next installment of Nutcracker mice, and scurry out to the office clutching my frilled skirt around me. I dial up Philip Morgan at his office at Duke University, eager to hear his analysis of the recent study he conducted on our cultural notions of ideal family size. He has long studied the discrepancy between the number of children young women say they want, and the number they actually have. I've seen the extensive tables in his myriad papers on intended fertility-the number of people who say they want one kid is below one percent, even in Europe where the fertility rate across the continent is well below two. Citing such figures, he tells me that nobody wants just one kid, not anywhere, not even in Europe where fertility rates have plummeted. Morgan is clinical and abrupt, circling back to the numbers whenever I attempt to talk about our cultural biases, our politics, what we see on TV. I explain to him that I am an only child by design, and that the small child giggling in a tutu may well be one too.

Now he abandons the figures. "Listen, no offense to your mother or to yourself," he says, "but I had three sons and I'm glad they have brothers."

I am silent. He continues, "I can't imagine having just one child. What would that be like? I don't know why anyone would want it. Their relationships with each other have been the greatest joy of my life. You're saying to your kid, ‘you're never going to have a brother and a sister. When your parents die you are alone except for the family you create.'" He clears his throat and goes back to the numbers.

I stop taking notes, too furious to pretend he's simply offering me information. How patronizing! And yet, I'm unsettled by his words. Certainly, he has raised points that I have long-considered. I've always known that there can be advantages to sibling relationships, but my own experience without them was so positive I never worried I would deprive Dahlia if Justin and I decided to stop at one. But to hear of the joy witnessing his kids together has brought him exposes me to something new: never before had I considered what I would be missing as a parent.

As Dahlia grows into full-on childhood, with her delicious toddlerhood slipping away, I can feel why parents want it again, and why they want that childhood to include more children. I may prefer my own lean threesome in the end, but will it really be because I'm reassured by studies, or by my own personal desires? I'd be kidding myself if I said the former and not the latter.