I Should Have Had a Third Baby

Anne Hathaway definitely doesn’t remember me. We were in the same “British Literature through 1800” seminar in college circa 2001 (Beowulf for the win!), and she once gave me a 15-second piggyback ride outside a house party off-campus. She was lovely, smart and supremely normal-seeming. She could have been me! (If me was a 5’8” bombshell who had just starred in Princess Diaries.)

Ever since then, I’ve followed her career and life with the parasocial curiosity of a woman “projecting.” Anne owned Brooklyn real estate a mile from me! Anne also married a nice, bearded guy with an Ivy League pedigree! Anne had two kids, right around the time I did, and seemed like a good mom, balancing her family, her career and her admirable experimentation with corseted leather mini-dresses.

And then there was the Annie/Andy crossover. Clearly Anne isn’t actually her Devil Wear’s Prada character. But it was hard not to think she was speaking directly to me when she emerged this spring, in head-to-toe vintage Gaultier, as a wizened magazine editor forging her path in an AI-sloppified media landscape.

So naturally, I took it hard when she announced her third pregnancy at age 43 on Instagram this week, posing bashfully in heeled flip-flops and an earth-mother blouse-and-skirt-combo against her walnut wainscotting and marble mantle. (PS: Do she and I have the same Wayfair rug?)

My response was visceral: I thought we were on the same page, Anne! I thought we both agreed that two was the right number of children to raise in this crazy world.

The truth is, I’ve had complicated feelings about a third child for a while now, and it’s not Anne’s fault that I hedged. When the pandemic hit, my husband and I were both working full-time, with a five- and three-year old at home and zero help beyond the “zoom classes” the preschool was half-assing. The thought of more children was laughable. How? Where? On what budget?

As time passed, we got older and the idea of another baby slipped further away—the kids became self-sufficient, our careers took hold, I read article after article about the dim prospects for pregnancy after 40. (Oh yeah, and somewhere in there, my husband got a vasectomy. Oops.)

“I thought we were on the same page, Anne! I thought we both agreed that two was the right number of children to raise in this crazy world.”

Then, somewhere around my 42^nd birthday, I looked around and my kids were big and I missed the early years—the snuggles, the intimacy, even the sleepless nights. I also started to see so many babies. These babies were cute, guys, and many were to women my own age. Sometimes these were even third babies, often coming years after kids 2 and 3. My neighbor, who has a 14- and 10-year-old, was proudly parading down the block, her 8-month belly out and a smile on her face. “Did I make a mistake?” I thought. “Could I have swung it?”

Clearly, it’s impossible to know. My children—ages 11 and 9—are perfect (don’t tell me otherwise), and our life is full in a way it couldn’t be with a newborn. Nobody needs help pooping anymore. Everybody can watch PG-13 movies. This summer, we are going to Bryce Canyon where we’ll hike for hours and ride horses and do other things you can’t do when you are zero. But I’m also aware of how fleeting this season of parenthood is. Should I have prolonged it? Or would trying for a third at age 43 somehow have tempted fate, or brought on more risk and heartache?

My good friend Anne may very well have grappled with these same questions. Or she may have always known that three was in the cards. Fertility is weird, in that it’s one of the few things in life where you really can wait too long.

Who knows what the future will bring, of course—for me or my other moms-of-two. After all, life is long, vasectomies are reversable and science is amazing. And hey, if Janet Jackson can do it at 50…