One, and done.

It always happens: some kind, well meaning person asks when we will be having a second kid. My responses are usually clever and sometimes curt, but with each inquiry, I am forced to examine my stance of the second-kid issue. I'm one-and-done.As hard as it is to close that door, still being young enough to physically conceive (if not mentally or emotionally), I have considered what it would mean to have a second child, and it would kill me.

Many people say things like, "You don't realize you have the capacity to love something that much until you have a child," to which I will agree. Then comes the but - "But when you have a second, it will happen again."This presumption is what I find most challenging, and most threatening.

No thanks. That's the poison I cannot swallow.

I love my child so much, it hurts. To have a second would end me.

From the second Ezra was born, love became tangible, no longer an abstract concept; the emotion I felt grew forth from me like an appendage, something that was always potentially in existence prior to his birth, but afterwards, physically apparent, present like an arm or a leg - and even more fragile. This fragility has caused me to hurt, daily, and incessantly.

It hurts knowing that I have something I care for so overwhelmingly that it envelops my being in a sort of suffocating cocoon of affection. 

Driving Ezra home from the hospital, I called my mother. Very sincerely, I told her that I understood, then, what I hadn't prior. I will always worry, from that day forward, and it would never, ever cease, a vicious and enduring cycle, my proverbial, emotional rocking chair - back and forth, but never getting anywhere - until the day I die. 

It's chronic pain for which there is no treatment.

There are times when I feel like an elephant is standing upon my chest as I become consumed by anxiety. This is a new feature since parenthood, and controls me, rendering me incapable of being the person I once was: carefree, enjoying reckless behavior, thinking of the near, but not distant, future. Not anymore. What little shred of identity that remains in me is preserved in amber, a harder, parental exterior has crystalized over the faint remains of a former person. Yes, I'm still me, but I've been changed in a way that is irreversible.

I am consumed, willfully, by love, and it pains me.

This love is the best pain I have ever felt, and, masochistic as it is, I will continue to ache as long as I can, but I can't do it twice.