On Having More Than One

If we get to be parents, this is precisely the reason I want to have more than one child. It might be selfish, but I'm a (future) Jewish mother and the idea of losing a child feels me with dread and I don't even have one.

The last few paragraphs made me a little weepy, from John Hodgman's, "Apologia to My Second Child":

And so you see, I cannot take the risk. Like a farmer who needs children to till the soil and cannot risk having but one, so I need more than one child to lower my risk of absolute awful heartache.

To be honest, I do not know how this will work out. I, the only child, find it difficult to understand how love can be dispersed between two children. And there will be other shortages. There will be no perfect triangle. There will be alliances and counteralliances. There will be no short stories written near a fern. The stories that you write will be those you conspire out of nighttime conversation with Hodgmina [older sister - Pdov]. For, yes, you will live in an apartment, and you will have to share a room.

But you will be freer to fail, as your errors will be outshadowed by Hodgmina's and vice versa. And thus you will free yourselves of the unfair burden to avoid death at all costs. By having you, unnamed male child, I have chosen to give you both less so that at the end, as point by point, the shape of our family disappears, you will not have lost everything.

Also, I love my big sister. We have (had) differences, but she means the world to me and I feel so happy our parents decided to have more than just her. :P