Ghost Child
My last child has just turned three. I want another child—a fourth child. The number of children that gets you stares at the supermarket, that makes your mom and sister say, “You’re fucking crazy.” I want this child so badly I can feel it close by, as if it is hiding within me, not to be eventually expelled from my body, but a shadow—a ghost child.
I don’t admit this to anyone except for my husband and—only in jest—to my family. I say, with a smirk, “Sometimes I think another one wouldn’t be so bad” as my three kids and my niece and nephew rip apart my house. And, living up to their expected performance, my sister’s eyes get big and my mom says, “Oh no, I’m moving away” and I say “I’m just joking” with a little smile, even though I think they know I’m not.
When I was younger I wished for no children. Then I was told I might not be able to have children, and I wished desperately for my first. Once I had my first boy in my arms, I wanted a whole brood—three seemed like a good number to transport with a normal-sized car and with all the chaos and hilarity that ensues with more children. My husband and I counted the years that we would have each one—an ordered plan that we didn’t believe needed the universe’s buy-in. One morning, pregnant and playing on the floor with my toddler, the light folded through a crystal we had hanging up in his window and spread its refracted light across his face. He giggled with joy. We are so lucky, I thought. And the other children who will come into this family will be so lucky, too.
That child in my stomach died before I woke up to hold him, after an emergency c-section on the day he was due to be born. The first lucid thought I had, other than that breathless longing for my son whom I had just handed to morgue workers, was to have another child. Not to replace him, but to turn the world right-side up again.
The next eighteen months of my life were marked with therapy and walks on a secluded beach where I could scream into the waves and hope no one would hear me. But it was also filled with a singular obsession to have another child. My daughter was born a little over two years after her older brother died. Those two years had felt like an eternity in the in-between—a twilight-zone space where I pretended to be human as I watched real humans fall in love, get married, and have children. With my daughter, I finally felt able to re-enter that strange space of early childhood.
Our third—another boy—followed two years later. A boy with black curled hair like the one we lost. He’s a tornado—strong-willed but strong-loving too. He doesn’t like to be far from me, except for when he’s hiding because he painted the walls with toothpaste or snuck a can of coke and sprayed it all over the kitchen or ripped all the leaves off my favorite houseplant. Oh, how I love him, but he exhausts me. And I’m far along in my grief journey now that living matters as it once did. I can get frustrated at the mundane things I thought I would never care about again when my son died and the world had flipped upside down.
So, here I am, feeling heart palpitations from the anxiety of working full-time and raising three strong-willed children, with a husband who often works nights and weekends, in a society where we feel like we have to do everything for our kids, including driving a minivan full of children an hour each way to soccer games on weekends (and two days a week for practice). I’m awful at asking for help—perhaps it's a deranged sense of pride. And I don’t think I could mentally handle another child. I tell my oldest I cannot even handle another hermit crab. I love being with my children; I love the chaos of their joy and their discoveries. Yet more often than I would like to admit I feel the panic rising in my chest, the feeling of heaviness invading my lungs, the panic taking over my body. It emerges when the kids are fighting all morning and I burst, or when I want to walk the dog and instead have to steam clean markers off a new rug. It even happens, sometimes, for no reason at all.
My rational brain tells me that we cannot have another child, and I will listen to this rational brain. Another child would be incredibly expensive, it would impact my work and my tenure file, it would make me even more resentful at the seemingly insurmountable piles of tasks I have to complete each day. It would make me feel even less adept at providing for each of our children’s unique and sometimes competing needs. I would feel more of a failure than I already do. I would yell more, be less patient. We cannot have a fourth child.
Since my son died, there are several things I can never do again. One is that I can never plan for the future as I once did. I can’t say, nonchalantly, Oh, when I retire, or Oh, when my oldest graduates from college. I thought I knew the future once but I was wrong, and I will never make that mistake again. And the second thing is I think I will never stop wanting children or, at least, this ghost child that has taken up residence in me. Another child feels like a bulwark from pain, from loneliness, from any other loss that will come—expected or not. I know how precious children are, each one of them so different and so challenging in their differences.
Maybe this is something new I am learning—a lesson my son is still teaching me eight years after his death. I feel the bass line strumming faster, I feel the urge to sing: You can’t always get what you want, but you can try sometimes!
How I want to hold him again, to parent him. Perhaps this deep desire that I cannot shake for a fourth child is a desire for what I once had and yet what I can never have again—the one who was tucked inside me, the son I held, whose nose I kissed, and whose ashes I now keep in a small cloth bag. Maybe what feels missing is what will always be missing and must be missing, and it is ok to desire what we know we cannot attain.
Desire seems dependent on the satisfaction of what it craves, otherwise it turns dangerous or destructive. Some religious beliefs reject desire because of this possible transformation into avarice, gluttony, lust—all synonyms for a desire that cannot be quenched. But I’m not ready to give up my desire, even if I know it cannot possibly be. I’ll carry that ghost child along with me, not the one who lived briefly and died, although he is with me too, but the ghost of potential, of new life, of expansiveness, of throwing caution to the wind, of being a carefree mother who can shoulder more life and more love and more responsibilities without … collapsing.
-Elizabeth Schmermund
Elizabeth Schmermund is an academic and writer. She lives on Long Island with her family and is an assistant professor at SUNY Old Westbury. Her chapbook, Alexander the Great, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2024.