"Do I really want a fifth person in my house? Not really. Do I, rather, want to feel as if I were the kind of mother who could handle another child..."

"... even though I know, thanks to the COVID years, that I’m likely not? Wanting to feel like you can do it is, it goes without saying, a stupid reason to have a kid. I remember telling a friend who was appalled at my desire for a third that I craved a repeat of that big explosion of Technicolor feeling that came with a new baby.... Our society is designed to enable and reward parenthood for some women and guarantees a thriving existence for basically no children. The work we do to fight these systems is reproductive labor even when there’s not a single baby in your house. So, really, the question I need to ask myself is not Who was that phantom baby? What might our life have been? It’s Who am I, now? And what can I do for the people who are already here?"

Writes Lydia Kiesling, in "Yearning for a Third/Did I really need another baby for my family to be complete?" (New York Magazine).

That's how the essay ends — with commitment to a cold left-wing platitude and italicized wistfulness about the life she decided the "systems" had denied to her. 

The author calls herself away from the question "Who was that phantom baby?" That felt so sad to me.

I don't know if this really connects, but what swirled up in my mind was the last thing Andre said in "My Dinner with Andre": "People hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again for the same reason: because they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean, a wife? A husband? A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?"

"...people hold on to these images: father, mother, husband, wife, again for the same reason: ’cause they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean, a wife? A husband? A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?"