Three’s a Crowd
By Tiffany Lewis

Over peanut butter and jelly the other day, my son asked about China.

I’m not sure where he even heard about China, but I plunged forward without question, telling him about the Great Wall, the rice fields, and the one-baby policy.

The Wall intrigued him, but he got stuck on the fact that the government only allows parents to have one child.  Later, while I was mopping the floor, he’d come up and say, “Tell me more about China and the one baby.”  So we’d talk about how sad is that children there don’t have brothers and sisters to play with.  (Of course, this was all a covert way of getting him to appreciate his little brother and the sibling to come.)

Each time I’d conclude with, “But we’re so lucky.  Here in America we can have as many babies as we want!”

Which is a mostly true statement.

I’m beginning to realize there is a difference between what is legal and what is acceptable.   In our society, two is the acceptable number.  Most everyone has two children, and mostly close together.  No one was surprised when we announced we were expecting #2, except when they mistook my husband and me for high school students.  For the most part, people were thrilled, elated, congratulatory.

But then we announced …The Third.

Suddenly I feel like I’m living a scene out of Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game.  I’m carrying my own little Wiggin, and I get stares as if a bugger is sitting on my head.

Strangers first assess the situation.  Their eyes track the two little boys running around my legs, then glance at my distended belly.

“You’re pregnant?” they ask, in disbelief.

“Yes!” I say, trying, through my exhaustion, to sound full of vigor and vim.

“On purpose?”

“Yes. We’re very excited.”

“But you’re going to be done after three?” they press.  My answer to this has tempered a bit.  I used to say something about always wanting six or seven children, but interrogators usually never regained consciousness after that remark, so now I just reply:

“Well, we’re just taking them one at a time.  We like big families.”

“Well, good luck,” they say doubtfully, handing me a receipt and my bag of ice cream and pickles.

Friends are not nearly as subtle.  They usually gasp and say, “Well, better you than me!”

In having a third child, we have one societal excuse.  Most people assume that we’re “going for the girl,” as if having children were like playing in the Super Bowl and you can’t feel satisfied until your championship ring is stamped with both genders.

Our society was built for families of four.  In having a third child, we are breaking out of the mold of comfort.  We can’t sit at a table for four when we go out to eat (which luckily never happens anyway) and if we win a family four-pack to Disney, there will be a child left hanging. Costco carts and the little driveable car carts at Home Depot only seat two children.  My double jogging stroller will be obsolete.  We’ll have to insert the extra leaf onto our dining room table.  And our little Toyota Corolla, no matter how much my husband tries to convince me, will never accommodate three car seats.  We’ve outgrown the American way of life.

This doesn’t seem to bother my husband, who is in the thick of MBA school and thinks it’s our personal responsibility to stop the impending population crisis … in Europe.  “The labor force over there is headed for disaster,” he announced the other day.  “In twenty years there is going to be a severe shortage of workers.”   This is probably true, and perhaps since we are surrounded by Russians, Italians, Brits and Irish here in Miami, he forgets that our children can do very little to bolster the European work force, since we don’t actually live abroad.

We live in America, where everyone has their boy and their girl and can’t fathom having more.   Which makes me wonder what will happen if and when numbers four, five, six come along.  I asked my mother-in-law, the venerable mother of nine children, what she would tell people when she was expecting number seven on up.

“We just stopped telling people,” she said.  Which sounds like a good strategy.  Either that or shuttle them off to Battle School in the Belt.  I hear they’re great at accommodating Thirds.