Other mothers told me it would happen, but I didn’t believe them.

When I was hugely pregnant with our second child, I’d waddle into our son’s preschool for pick-up and some rosy-cheeked mom of four would inevitably say, “When your second one turns three, you’re going to want a third.”

If looks could kill, I would have been arrested for first-degree murder.

"I didn’t feel I’d tapped into some perfect iteration of my feminine self. Mostly, I felt sick to my stomach and lost in a fog of despair."

When I was pregnant, I didn’t glow. I didn’t feel I’d tapped into some perfect iteration of my feminine self. Mostly, I felt sick to my stomach and lost in a fog of despair. During that second pregnancy, a cross-country move and the decision to stop working full-time, combined with the hormonal tsunami of growing an actual person in my uterus, plunged me into a depression.

And then there was the mullet. Around six months into my pregnancy, I visited a new salon. I told the stylist how much I loved her haircut, and she beamed, “We could do this for you!” I should have realized that she—a petite Asian woman in hip street clothes—was a better fit for an asymmetrical mullet than a very pregnant 38-year-old wearing mom jeans with an elastic waistband. I left the salon in tears.

And when I met mothers who’d tell me how much I’d want another baby in a few years, I’d glare at them from beneath the brim of my hair-helmet and scoff with absolute certainty: “No freaking way.”

"The only thing that kept me going in those final weeks was the knowledge that I would never have to be pregnant again. "

By the end of my pregnancy I’d packed on an extra 60 pounds and was wearing the same maroon yoga pants day and night. I could barely keep up with our rambunctious son, then three, not to mention the household chores and the little bit of work I was doing. The only thing that kept me going in those final weeks was the knowledge that I would never have to be pregnant again. That morsel of truth was like a shining beacon in the distance: Never again. Done. Finito. My husband, not sure who’d abducted his wife and replaced her with a sobbing wretch in a really bad haircut, was in full agreement.

So when did everything change? Was it the moment after Jessie was born, and I thought I’d never seen so lovely a person? Was it when, a few months later, her big brother, William, put all his stuffed animals around her head in her bouncy chair to make her stop crying? Maybe it was when she was teething and I asked William if we should exchange her for another, quieter baby and he replied, “You can’t do that! She’s in our family. And whatever’s in your family, keep.”

"The possibility of a third child became, well, a possibility."

I don’t know when it happened, but at some point during the past two and a half years, the possibility of a third child became, well, a possibility. Now I veer wildly and by the hour between wanting another person in our family and wanting to leave well enough alone. Sometimes raising small kids feels so grueling that, as I’m loading sippy cups into the dishwasher for the umpteenth time, I stare out the kitchen window and fantasize about running away to Mexico for a month without even saying good-bye, just to be free again.

And then I wander upstairs and find them curled up together in William’s bottom bunk. He is reading Green Eggs and Ham to her, intently enunciating each word as she looks up at me, smiling as if she holds a great secret. My exhaustion vanishes in a heartbeat.

I think: Who was I before we had them? Who will I be when they are gone?