Welcome to Baby Brain, a space where I - Charlotte, hi! - write about my life as a mother of three small children - Poppet (m, 4 years), Pickle (m, 3 years) and Peach (f, 9 months.) Those are not their real names. These are real stories from our days.
Looking lovingly at Peach in my bed the other day, I turned to my husband: “I’m so glad we had her,” I told him, overcome with affection for the tiny space stealer we have the pleasure of calling our daughter, “our beautiful little question mark. In an alternate reality, there’s a chance she doesn’t exist.”
My husband and I have just finished watching a show called Devs. A 2020 mini-series I won’t fully go into because a) spoilers and b) my eyes might roll right out of my head, Devs is an overcomplicated piece with a bored seeming cast that sort of boils down to the idea that the multiverse is real - that there are many versions of our lives playing out all at once, each determined by a choice we’ve made along the way. To this end, Poppet and Pickle exist everywhere always, as they weren't really decisions for us so much as lives that felt inevitable. Peach, however, was an uncertainty. A human shaped question mark hanging over our marriage. The wonderful little creature we nearly said no to after months of asking the same questions: “what do you think, should we?” “would we regret not doing it?” “do you feel like you’re ‘done’?” before, one day: “When I picture our future it feels like a face is missing,” my husband said and, ten months later - in our reality, at least - she was born.