A letter to the baby we never had

Dear Sebastian

This is my apology to you. Your two elder sisters are at preschool and child care today. I’m supposed to be doing uni work, but instead I’m thinking about how to explain to you why we could decide so easily, so quickly and so simply to have your two sisters, but with you – we agonised. No one wants to hear that do they? That they were an accident or a surprise, or else, that we weren’t even sure whether or not to have another child.

But I owe you the truth. Growing up, I always thought I would have a big family, when asked how many kids I wanted one day, ‘six children’, was always my confident response. And when people knowingly told me that I would change my mind when I was older, I was adamant that I wouldn’t. But as I reached my twenties, I started to realise that I was changing – there were other things to take into consideration: financial issues, the desires of my partner, and I eventually compromised, OK, I’ll have four children instead.

Then I had my first. And the day she reached six weeks old, I found myself crying on the couch wondering what I had gotten myself into? Why didn’t I believe everyone that told me being a mother was hard? I started to think, ‘well, maybe just three children’.

Next came my second baby girl. Things were going fine for a while, but then everything started to crash around me. I kept losing my temper. Your big sister would be refusing to eat her dinner, the baby would be crying from her cot, and I’d find myself weeping on the kitchen floor as I waited for your dad to get home from work. Finally he convinced me to go and talk to someone and I was very quickly diagnosed with postnatal depression. From there it was a long road to recovery. Visits to the psychologist, and an eventual decision to go on to anti-depressants, and days and days of reminding myself: ‘You are not a bad mother. You are not a bad mother,’ over and over. Until one day, I started to believe my own words.

Then came the day to discuss whether or not we should try for baby number three. The day to discuss having you. We struggled. Your dad didn’t want to see me go through the pain of PND all over again. I was torn – I’d always wanted a big family, how could I have gone from so desperately wanting six children all those years ago to be now considering stopping at just two? 

We’d had your name picked out from before we had your eldest sister by the way, always just in case… if it’s a boy, we’ll name him Sebastian. Seb for short. But now you were slipping through my fingers.

And so this leads me to my final apology, because Sebastian, as it turns out, you don’t exist. We never did have you. We decided that our family, with our two little girls, is complete and so we never tried for a third – whether they would have been a boy or a girl. I’m so sorry baby number three.

I am forever grateful for the fact that I was able to have two healthy babies and feel tremendously for those who don’t have the luxury of agonising over whether to have two or three or more children, but instead are struggling just to have one.

Nicola Moriarty is a writer, student and mum from Sydney’s north west. She is the younger sister of bestselling authors Liane Moriarty and Jaclyn Moriarty. Her debut novel Free-Falling was released in February of this year and she is currently working on her second novel. You can find her blog here

How did you decide how many children would make your family complete?