Today I celebrated St. Patrick's Day with corned beef and cabbage and my six-week post-partum check-up, where the doctor cleared me for vacuuming, heavy lifting, and doing the nasty and at my request outlined my options for permanent birth control. Luck of the Irish, indeed!
"To three or not to three" has been a hot topic of conversation since the day I came home from the hospital. Seriously. Because I am not an easy, breezy, let's-wait-and-see type of gal. I am a planner. I want to know if I should hold onto my maternity clothes or ship them off to Goodwill. If we need to keep the bouncy seat and the swing and the bassinet and the numerous Tupperware bins of the cutest baby clothing you ever did see or offer them to a family in need. If we're shopping for condoms or scheduling The Snip. If we're done having children, I told Luke, then I want to do something about it now so I can come to terms with closing the BABIES BABIES BABIES chapter of our life and focus on the future.
Luke has always been pretty consistent in his "two is enough" stance. He just turned 35, and if he stays home with the kids until Nathan starts kindergarten (not set in stone, but it's what we're aiming for right now), he won't rejoin the work force until he's 40; a third baby would force him to put off his career even further, and he's not comfortable with that. He's also excited to get to a place where the kids are a little older and we're not sinking money into diapers, formula, and baby wipes.
As for me, I used to be squarely in the "two is good, but three is even better!" camp. The oldest of five, I can appreciate a chaotic household rife with sibling rivalry and sleepless nights, and I was afraid that "just two" would be too tame, too quiet. I figured a third child would add a little zing to our family dynamic, and I talked and talked and talked about it to Luke until he agreed to think about it, and at one point during my pregnancy with Nathan I sort of won him over, and then Nathan was born, and just like that, I lost him. And that's OK. While I think I could do this one more time in another few years, I'm also insanely in love with the family I have now. I'm no longer worried about things being too quiet (two screaming babies will do that to you). I no longer feel like anyone will be missing from our dinner table if we stop at two, even if the very thought of parting with Kara's and Nathan's old sleepers makes me want to Ugly Cry.
Where was I? Birth control. Right.
I always (half) joke with Luke that since they had to cut me open twice to deliver our babies, he could certainly do his part by spending some time with a local urologist. But then I learned about a procedure for women that offers permanent sterilization and can be performed during an office visit in under an hour. It's called Essure, and it involves going through your cervix to insert metal coils into your fallopian tubes and taking a confirmation test three months later to verify that the coils were inserted successfully. It's less invasive than having your tubes tied, but unlike a vasectomy, it's not reversible. The procedure is relatively new—around five years old, I think—so it's not very common right now, but my doctor said there's been a surge of interest at her practice in the last year. I'm seriously thinking about doing this because it all sounds simple enough. I'm not interested in taking any form of hormonal birth control, so if for some reason Luke and I decided to put off doing anything permanent, we would just use condoms until we were ready.
Have any of you undergone Essure? If so, what did you think?
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Excerpted from Parental Discretion Advised, originally published on Parents.com. Copyright 2009 by Meredith Corporation. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
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