Completing our Incomplete Family

We are pregnant, again. We are looking forward to welcoming another little boy, Mateo Antonio Clark, into our family in February. This was a planned pregnancy, though not part of the Original plan. 

The Original plan was always to have two kids. We decided to start young – I was 27 when we got pregnant with Jackson. I figured a few years later we’d bring our second and final baby into the world. The plan was that we’d all grow up together, our family of four. 

After Jackson died, I not only mourned the end of his life, but the end of this vision. I also specifically mourned the second and final baby we would never meet. Of course, we eventually had Owen, but this was on a much different timeline than we otherwise would have planned. Owen is here because Jackson is not. Had Jackson lived, his little sibling would have been someone else. 

From time to time I find myself wondering… who would that second and final baby have been? What would they have been like? What would their relationship to Jackson have been like? What would the backseat fights have been over? What would they have enjoyed doing together? What would our complete family of four portrait have looked like? 

Whatever it would have looked like, it looks nothing like our current family portrait. Our portrait today has two entirely different kids – Owen, our other second-but-not-final-baby, and Mateo, our bonus third baby we never planned on having at all. Both Owen and Mateo are gifts we were never “supposed” to have – but they also came at the steep cost of my first set of babies I was “supposed” to raise and grow old with.

But are we ever really “supposed” to have anything? Is the reality of what we have not truer than some idea of what we thought we were entitled to? Our current family portrait, different as it may be, is also not a lesser consolation prize. I want to make sure that my living children understand they are not understudies to an original cast. 

People ask us whether we are done having kids after Mateo. The truth is I don’t know. I never planned to birth and raise three children, but I also never planned to lose one of them along the way. Physically and emotionally, we feel very ready to be “done,” but a vasectomy also feels out of the question. I am not necessarily expecting for my children to keep dying, and nor am I sure that we would continue to have kids in the event of further tragedy. It’s hard to say when our family will feel “complete,” and I am not even sure that “completeness” is what we’re striving for. I’ll always wonder what our family would have been like had Jackson lived, and I’ll also always treasure the family right in front of me, the one I (hopefully) get to keep.