Episode 45: Should We Have Another Baby? My Honest Journey to Baby Number Two
For a long time, I was certain I was done having children.
Pregnancy was hard. Postpartum was hard. Becoming a mother challenged me in ways I never anticipated, and for nearly two years after my daughter was born, I couldn't imagine willingly signing up to do it all again.
In this deeply personal solo episode, I share the honest journey that took me from a firm "one and done" mindset to deciding to welcome a second child into our family.
This wasn't a decision that happened overnight. It involved confronting fears about my mental health, finances, identity, career, marriage, and whether I could truly show up for two children in the way I wanted to.
I open up about the pressure many parents face when deciding whether to have another child, the guilt that can accompany either decision, and why I believe family size is an intensely personal choice.
I also explore the conversations that helped shift my perspective, including reflections from other mothers, discussions with my therapist, and honest conversations with my husband about what our future might look like.
Along the way, I share:
Why I spent nearly two years firmly opposed to having another child
The mental health concerns that influenced my decision-making
The fears many parents don't openly discuss when considering expanding their family
How my relationship with motherhood evolved over time
The surprising moments that began changing my perspective
What helped me move from fear toward possibility
The role therapy played in helping me process this decision
My thoughts on sibling relationships and family dynamics
The reality of making life-changing decisions when there are no guarantees
Why comparison can make these choices even harder
Whether you're wrestling with the decision to have another child, grieving the family size you imagined, embracing being one-and-done, or simply curious about someone else's experience, this episode offers an honest look at the complexity of family planning and trusting yourself through major life transitions.
At its core, this conversation is about giving yourself permission to change your mind, honoring your own timeline, and recognizing that there is no universally right path—only the one that feels right for you.
As Stephanie prepares for maternity leave and the arrival of baby number two, she reflects on the lessons she's learned, the fears that remain, and the excitement of stepping into a new chapter for her family.
Because sometimes the most important decisions aren't about certainty—they're about learning to trust yourself enough to move forward.
This episode completes Season II of the Redefining Us podcast. We will be back at the start of 2027 and look forward to being with you all again then! For now, I’m going to go enjoy some newborn snuggles with our second.
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So if you want to keep informed on all the new things that are going on in the redefining us world, I encourage you to subscribe. Hi, I'm here to talk about an exciting topic, less interesting topic, and that is the idea of having a second child. Now, I just want to say I was someone who was like deeply on the fence about having baby number two. And for most of my first pregnancy and into my child's almost second year of life, I was like, hard no. I'm not doing this again. Pregnancy is rough, birth, recovering from birth, postpartum, all of that. My experience was that it was not comfortable, not ideal for my mental health. It just felt like it was a really big struggle at each turn. And I found myself when people were asking me, like, so do you think you're gonna have another one? And I was like, uh not right now and maybe not ever. And yeah, it was like in a hard no camp. And I think it's okay to be in that camp. Um, and it felt like that's what the right answer was for me at the time. And that's kind of where I just like lived and felt really good about that decision for a lot of reasons. One, I again, it was so hard that I was worried that my mental health w wouldn't be able to be okay for another baby. And I also felt like I was still figuring out what it meant to be a mom, as I've kind of referenced in other episodes. And I really feel like I was trying to just figure out what life even looked like with one kid. The idea of introducing a second kid felt just bonkers to me for a long time. And I did feel maybe a little bit of guilt at first for not really wanting more, but all of the other feelings that I had were so much stronger. There's definitely like people that were asking me, you know, both strangers as well as like people in my life. Um, because I think there is a lot of pressure to have a sibling for your child or to have two kids for whatever reason that culture thinks that's important. I definitely think having another kid needs to be a personal choice and not one that feels like is pressured on you because other people think that's what would be good for you, or other people think that that's what you would want, and that you're just like denying yourself the truth or something that people seem to hold on to. I really do think that I had a lot of fears about the idea of having another baby, the financial stress. Daycare is not cheap. I wouldn't even say it's not very affordable. And our first child had to be in daycare because it is more affordable than having a nanny, but still not an affordable option. And I was worried that I would lose my identity again and worried that I would like again feel just as anxious, just as depressed, just as uncomfortable as I did the first time around. And who knows, I may still feel that way because I, you know, I'm still pregnant and not had my second child yet, but there's definitely a lot of fears around experiencing that again and the toll that stepping away from work would have on my career. And I'm not saying that any of these fears are gone, but I definitely think I they were more intense when I was both pregnant and in postpartum for about the first year and a half or more. I was also just worried about like, can I give my daughter the type of childhood and love that I want to give her if I have another child that I'm dividing my attention and love to? And can I can I do it again? Can I go through everything that I felt like I was going through to give my daughter the best infancy and toddlerhood that I could. And also I just had like this fear of disrupting my relationship with my husband. I think having a baby obviously creates a new dynamic when you're partnered up and a lot of people it doesn't it doesn't fare well to the relationship. And I think that my partner and I have a pretty solid relationship, but there's definitely moments where I was like, oh my gosh, this is really hard. This is hard to do and hard to have a good connection when you have this like new person pulling your attention away from the dynamic that we had previous to baby. And our dynamic has evolved and changed, and I'm sure it'll continue to evolve and change, and we've grown closer through this experience. But I definitely think there was points I would imagine that he would also say the same thing if he was on here of like, oh my gosh, this is intense. And I feel uh emotionally drained from having these two people in my life that are needing my attention and focus. And I think what really led me to having this path of ha wanting a second kid was a few things. One, I had talked to a bunch of other mom friends, and one of them said to me something along the lines of like, yes, it's going to be hard when you have two small children. And it might even be hard, you know, for a while, but the idea of having two kids like later in life, like that's what I'm looking forward to. Having these adult relationships or having these teenager relationships with my children later, like that's what I look forward to. And that resonated with me a little bit because I felt like, oh man, this part is like really challenging. And I don't really feel like you have a reciprocal relationship, let's say, with your child for what feels like quite a while. And then I was starting to see glimmers of having a reciprocal relationship with my daughter. And I would say even now our relationship is more reciprocal as she just gets older. She's only two and a half now, but at the time when I was having these feelings, I just felt like I was nothing but like a one-sided me giving, giving, giving. Um, and I was like, oh my goodness, like, is this what motherhood is like the entire time? And so when she said that, and then I was kind of thinking about my own personal experience, like putting in perspective of like, oh, this relationship will and does become reciprocal in a lot of ways. Obviously, not as reciprocal as like a partner relationship ever is or ever could be, but there is r reciprocity when it comes to like caring for one another and you know, having fun and smiling and all of those things that are feel-good um experiences that you can have with your child. And I think I also found myself feeling like, man, like I want to give my child the option or opportunity to have a sibling relationship, like someone who ideally will just, you know, always be there because they're they're siblings and they're blood related. And I think about my relationship with my siblings, and even though a lot of siblings, including my own, drive me crazy from time to time, they're still my siblings, and it's a unique relationship that you can't really replicate in a lot of ways with other people. And so I didn't want to, I guess, rob her of that experience, or even like rob my husband and I of the experience of not having another child and get to witness their sibling relationship develop. I think I also came to this point. I was turning, I was set 36 at the time, and I was about to turn 37, and I thought to myself, like, and this is just my own beliefs, not necessarily do I think everyone should think this, because I don't think it's actually healthy to some extent of like, oh my goodness, I'm gonna be 40 in in three years. Like, I better decide whether or not I want a child now, or um, it's probably not gonna happen, especially since it took my husband and I a while to conceive our first child. I really thought, like, okay, we're gonna I'm gonna have to make this decision soon because it could take just as long to get pregnant the second time. And so there was this sense of like, okay, it's either do or die. I need to make a choice. And I felt like, okay, I'm starting to move towards the idea of wanting a second child if I'm even thinking about this idea of it's like a do or die choice. And I had some conversations with my husband, and he was always on board for baby number two. I think he really wanted or still does really wants this like solid family unit that feels like it's complete. And he kept telling me that he felt like, you know, he would be okay with just having one, but would feel even more complete with two. And he couldn't really explain why, just like the sense that he had for himself. And I was starting to move in that direction. So we we just had more and more conversations about what that would look like and how we would make that work as a therapist. I'm also in therapy as well. So I had plenty of conversations with my own therapist about my fears and what this would look like, and you know what capacity do I have um to do this again, financially, emotionally, physically. And I really think that helped like move the needle for me. And I was like giving myself permission to say, like, let's try, let's let's see what happens. Maybe I won't be able to get pregnant again and you know, have to face that, or maybe we will get pregnant again and then I'll have to face that decision. Um, and so yeah, I kind of just felt in my gut one day like this is a yes. And so yeah, I think it was surprising to me, even when I moved to the the yes side. And it felt a little bit like, oh my goodness, like am I just jumping back on another emotional roller coaster here? And the answer is most likely yes. Like uh, you know, the pregnancy that I've been having has definitely not been a walk in the park. My pregnancies generally, I experience a lot of like nausea and discomfort and fatigue and whatnot. But I think I'm finding myself feeling more confident walking into having baby number two. Obviously, there's still a lot of things that make me nervous and probably always will as someone who has predisposition to be an anxious human being. But I'm finding myself feeling like, okay, I'm not gonna be doing this for the first time. It's not gonna be like I'm flying the plane while I'm building it in the same way I was flying the plane and building it the first time around, because I have some context and some points of reference from time one. So my hope is that I will feel this way even in postpartum that I am feeling right now during this pregnancy. And my husband and I have talked about that as well. Like even he was was reflecting on how anxious he was and almost didn't feel like she was actually gonna come the first time just from her pre experience of having some miscarriages. But I think this time he feels like really confident that he he's gonna be okay, our second child's a boy, which kind of goes into, I think, the actual journey. When we found out he was a boy, we were both shocked. We were really thinking we're gonna have a girl, just because that's kind of what we knew, I think, and I don't know, expected to happen. It's weird how your brain kind of gets like set up in these stories about what will be rather than just sitting in the what what could be. So yeah, when we found out we had a boy we were or we're having a boy, we're a little bit surprised. But I think after the first like day or two, we kind of like settled into like, okay, this is this is what we're doing. We're gonna be boy parents. And I'm sure there's still a lot to learn about being a girl parent, but because again, our daughter's only two and a half, but I think it's kind of nice getting to maybe have two children of different genders and see how they grow from growing up with one another and their personalities kind of shine through as time goes on. I do think I was a little apprehensive about am I going to explain this well to my two and a half year old? Well, will she be able to understand? What kind of understanding can you have at two and a half about there being another human introduced into your family? I would say she like understands as much as a two and a half year old can understand. She gets that she's gonna be a big sister, at least she says she does. She understands that this new baby has their own room. She understands to a certain extent that she's a big girl. So yeah, I guess we'll see how that all plays out. I'm sure it'll be uh a little bit of transition time as it is with any new thing in anyone's life. So she might have big feelings about it as time goes on. And I think just expecting that to be the case is helpful for me rather than thinking like, oh, it's all gonna be butterflies and roses. Because uh yeah, I think it takes w a while for people to be for people to adapt and for flexibility to come in, even myself as an adult. So I I don't expect my two year, two and a half year old like day one to be like, I'm adjusted to this new life already. Um it might take her a while, and I think that's okay. And just like preparing myself emotionally for that to shift as well. So yeah, I guess we'll see what happens. I will be taking about six months off from the podcast to be fully present with my new family member and this new family dynamic that uh will come from moving from a family of three to a family of four. Hopefully all of my listeners, you know, can understand that. There's a whole season one and season two to listen back on. That hopefully you can get what you came for listening to those episodes if this happens to be the first one that you're listening to. But yeah, I think I'm excited and nervous, and we'll probably come back season three, ready to talk about all of it. How well it's going, how what struggles we're facing. And I'm sure there will be some. I try to take a really realistic look, a realistic perspective and look at things rather than trying to be all optimistic or pessimistic. I'm sure it'll it'll go. It'll go, it'll flow, we'll figure out our new rhythm. And we're just gonna take it one day at a time. Yeah. And I'm just sharing this with you all just in case this resonates with you. I know plenty of people who said one and done and meant it. I know plenty of people who said, I want two kids and then decided they're just gonna have one, or I want two kids and then had kids back to back, uh, with not a lot of downtime in between. And that just wasn't my story. And so finding out my story without comparing it to other people's stories or other people's journeys, I think was really important to me. So I just wanted to put that as like a disclaimer on this. Like, you have your own story and do your best not to compare it to mine. Just I'm just sharing it for the sake of putting another story, another voice out there in case it resonates with you. All right. Well, thank you so much for listening. And yeah, I will talk to you in season three. This is Redefining Us, and I'm your host, Stephanie Konter-O'Hara Licensed Professional Counselor. And I'm so glad that you joined us today so we can dive into what it means to be a woman in today's society. Figuring out how we balance everything, how we grow, how we be more authentically us, and figuring out who we are through the transitions of life, whether that be motherhood, success, relationships, and all things that happen in women's lives, because it's definitely not a linear journey. And I think by talking about it and normalizing it and validating, we can all arise together and be the women that we were meant to be. So keep tuning in, and I'm so excited about joining the conversation and being in your ears each week. Let's get into it.