Free Playing House by Lauren Slater

go to work.
    “That’s a problem,” he said.
    “Who knows,” I said. “Maybe this time I’d be okay.”
    In the following few days, I pursued the question like a pollster. I called relatives and friends. My friend Corinna, mother of a three-year-old and a one-year-old, said, “It’s really no different having two. You’re all set up already. The second one sort of slips in.” But my friends Harvey and Lina said, “Two more than doubles the workload. You’ll never have downtime again.”
    That scared me. A lot. I am, after all, a writer and a depressive, both of which require downtime for their practice. And while I say this tongue in cheek, I’ve experienced both my vocations—the one I chose and the one that chose me—with a ferocious intensity. Writing takes mental space; even off the page, characters are calling out, talking, assuming shapes, so the goblet of your head feels, at times, uncomfortably full, and is there room for any more? Oftentimes, with my one child, I felt the pull between the page and her extraordinary self to be too much. My study is on the third floor of our house. It sits separated by a steep staircase and veils of unswept cobwebs. In here, I do my dreaming. And yet on so many days, she finds me, makes her way up, up, bangs on the door: “Mama, I made banana bread!” “Mama, I have water balloons!” And the crusty old conflict starts again; here or there, this or that; frustration that I’ve been disturbed, desire to be by her side, and when her footsteps recede, relief and grief. This is the life of a working mother.
    So, surely, to add another would be to uncomfortably crowd an already snug ship. And what would happen if the ship went down, if my mind went down, if the stress of a second tipped me over the ever-present edge? I consider myself a woman with a handicap, plain and simple. After five hospitalizations and two decades on a raft of medications, it’s hard to see myself as anything but. I do quite well, though, so long as the seas are smooth. Pregnancy, however, is never smooth. It’s a tidal surge of psychoactive hormones; it’s a blitzkrieg on the brain. Many women find it pleasant, those lapping waves of estrogen. Some, like me, find it corrosive.
    But then there are your dreams and models, neither of which goes lightly. Many people have, from their childhood, the formative stories, and mine were those of Gerald Durrell, who wrote a book I’ll never forget:
My Family and Other Animals
. I read it when I was twelve, under the arching elm tree in our backyard. I read it breathless and full of something brimming, both at the same time. Durrell described his family by a blue Aegean sea: there were brothers and books, sisters and singing, there were artsy bohemian parents with poetry and cigarettes. And then there was my own family, or rather, my foster family, where I did my growing up: a ramshackle house with a German shepherd, six cats, two albino rabbits with the palest pink eyes, a raccoon named Amelia, mice bred for blueness, mutton chops and roasted potatoes, a garden growing purple eggplants and tomatoes red as ornaments on their strong-smelling vines; a house crowded with kids and babies and animals and fruits, shouting, instruments, dope, fecundity everywhere, every one of us a practicing poet. What a situation! What a place! My foster parents read us
Macbeth
and showed us how to till the earth and taught us Latin. Their kids were strays, like me. When I thought of family at its best I thought—and still do—of my foster home and my huge-hearted foster parents, who picked children from the streets and animals from shelters and patched together something crooked, chaotic, and sweet.
    Of course, I wanted to replicate this, though, unlike my foster parents and despite my unruly upbringing, my tolerance for the far flung and dissonant is minimal. But we want what it is we’re not. I wanted to be the best kind of woman, penning her poems while sprinkling sugar