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The first night after we came home from the hospital with my 2-year-old daughter’s baby brother, I was irrationally determined to carry out a cherished routine. Every time I had ever tucked my little girl into bed, I sang James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” — but that evening, her bedtime arrived just as my newborn demanded to nurse. I made a choice: I handed my wailing infant to my husband and dashed into my daughter’s bedroom to say good night in the way she’d always known, as if nothing had changed.

Except everything had changed, and as I heard the baby crying through the wall, and saw my overwhelmed toddler staring at me wide-eyed, I felt my throat close as tears welled. I forced myself to sing anyway, and here is the truth: It was not good. I sounded like an anguished frog having an asthma attack. My daughter lay very still, regarding this pathetic spectacle warily, and then she whispered three of the most devastating words a child can say to their parent.

“Mama,” she said. “No more singing.”

If you have one kid, and you’re expecting another, you might think you know something about what’s coming, and how to prepare for it. You have the advantage of familiarity with elements of new parenthood that felt foreign the first time — the baby gizmos and gadgets, the basics of breastfeeding or bottle-feeding, how to wrap a swaddle that stays put for more than three seconds. But then an entirely distinct and unique new baby arrives, blithely indifferent to an older sibling’s blueprint, and you realize you have to learn how to care for this tiny stranger while also caring for your first offspring, who probably has some big feelings about the radical realignment of their family unit. Until this transition is upon you, the logistical and emotional chaos of having to divide your focus between two small humans (never mind yourself, never mind a partner) is hard to fathom.

“I think the shift from one to two children is such a drastic change in everyone’s life, and it is not explored enough or mentioned in general conversation,” says Sherisa de Groot, a mother of two and founder of the online literary platform <a href="https://www.raisingmothers.com/" target=_blank>Raising Mothers</a>. “I feel like I spent most of my pregnancy preparing my son and very little preparing myself.”

Several moms told me that, before the arrival of a second kid, they felt comforted by how reasonable the number sounded: two. But there are certain realms where mathematics gets complicated and counterintuitive — like quantum field theory, or the addition of one child to a family that already has one child. “One child is one,” says Joanna Kaylor, a mom to a 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter in Virginia. “Two children are actually somewhere between three and five kids’ worth of everything.” Add a stomach virus or a lice infestation to the equation, and a parent can no longer offer a numerical estimate because they’ve sprinted off into the hills wearing a lampshade for a hat.

Ryann Fapohunda, who has 3-year-old and 1-year-old boys, says she tried to brace herself, asking her friends what to expect when she was pregnant with her second. “My friends were like, ‘You know, there are days where I don’t even wash my face. I’m just too busy.’ And I’m like, ‘What do you mean? You don’t wash your face?’” She laughs. “I didn’t understand. And now I do.”

In the early years of a two-child family, there is an overwhelming physicality to the act of parenting. There is constant carrying, changing, buckling and dressing, the daunting task of supervising and safeguarding two bodies with one. Most parents of two (or more) kids have a story (or 10) about confronting this reality. A colleague once told me about the time she was wrangling her baby in his car seat, when his brother declared that he had to pee and took off running through a parking lot with his pants pulled down. He does not remember this. His mother will never forget.

Kaylor can still picture the morning when she was helping her 4-year-old son use the bathroom and she heard the sound of fluid splashing in the kitchen. It took her a moment to deduce that her toddler daughter was pouring milk all over the table and the floor, and there was absolutely nothing Kaylor could do about it. “When I came back in the kitchen, my daughter was playing in the milk and needed a bath,” she says. “Which meant my son also wanted a bath. At 8 a.m., as I was trying to get them out the door to day care.”

For Saranah Holmes Walden, a mom of two in North Carolina, the breaking point was always dinnertime, when her husband was still at work and she was juggling her newborn and toddler. “I remember one night having food on the stove, and my son was crying, and my 2-year-old daughter was asking for something and pulling on my legs,” she says. “I had to turn the fire off, feed my son, take care of my daughter, and dinner still wasn’t made, and then I remember looking around and being like: ‘Oh, gosh, there’s also laundry. There are bottles in the sink that need to be washed.’” It’s hard to find a word for what that time felt like, she says, except: “Whoa.”

I thought my second baby would be easier. Then I started drowning.

When second-time moms seek support from <a href="https://drjessicazucker.com/" target=_blank>Jessica Zucker</a>, a psychologist who specializes in maternal and reproductive mental health, they often tell her that they’re struggling with feelings of guilt over spending less quality time with their older child. They tell her that it’s hard to find time to rest and care for themselves.

“Second-time mothers, in my clinical experience, all too often blame themselves for ‘not being able to do it all,’” she says. “And yet, they are juggling it all! The culprit, I tell them, is the culture not supporting us in deep and meaningful ways as mothers.”

Zucker notes that the fatigue and demands of parenting two children can amplify feelings of anxiety or depression — and that even if a mom felt great after her first baby, that doesn’t mean she won’t struggle with postpartum mental health issues the second time.

The research on adding a second kid to a family is a mixed bag: <a href="https://penntoday.upenn.edu/2006-02-23/research/one-baby-or-two-study-looks-effect-having-second-child" target="_blank">One study indicated</a> that a second child can lead to a decline in happiness — but only for the mother; a father’s happiness appeared to hold steady between kids one and two. Numerous studies have suggested that having more kids can lead to <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2367106/" target="_blank">decreased satisfaction in a marriag</a>e, but a 2015 study found that a marriage might actually <a href="https://news.umich.edu/marriages-still-resilient-after-the-second-child/" target="_blank">be more resilient</a> the second time around.

Some parents find that their friends and family don’t rally around them as intensely for baby number two (if, like me, you had a second kid during the pandemic, then you might have found yourself even more isolated from a socially distanced village). Zucker says she’s heard second-time moms wonder aloud in therapy sessions about whether people “even care” about meeting a second child.

“The emotional temperature of the second-time mother seems not to be taken the way it is the first time around,” Zucker says. “Checking in. Sending food, flowers, gifts, support. My sense, though, is that it’s less a function of people not caring, but more of an assumption that mothers have ‘got this,’ since it is not their first rodeo.”

But it’s still uncharted territory: “No two pregnancies, deliveries or babies are the same,” she says. “No two motherhoods are necessarily the same, either.”

The tips and tricks that worked best with the first baby might not work at all for the second one. The suggestion to “sleep when the baby sleeps” — which was already a farce, let’s be real — is now a logistical impossibility.

When Katie Yen, a mom of two in D.C., had her first baby, her daily life revolved around her son’s feeding and sleeping schedule. While she was on maternity leave, she says, she’d stay up past 11 p.m. to nurse him one last time for the night, then both of them would alternate sleeping and nursing until nearly noon the next day.

“But there was no way that was happening with a second kid,” she says, “because now I had to get up and moving, to help get the first one off to day care, and get lunch prepared, and make breakfast.”

There are, of course, those fleeting, sacred hours in the late evening, after the kids are asleep and a blissful quiet descends. That’s when one voice in your head whispers: You are sleep deprived; go to bed, and another voice counters, Remember books? Remember TV? Remember uninterrupted snacking? The nightly question looms: Is it better to be a marginally rested parent-robot, or a corpse who has seen the most recent episode of “Ted Lasso”?

Erica Blue Roberts, a mom to a 5-year-old and a 21-month-old, remembers eyeing the clock, wondering at what hour her infant might wake her overnight. “You think, ‘I should go to sleep now, because I have no idea how my night is gonna go,’” she says. “But it’s also the only time you have for yourself. So you’re like, ‘I don’t care, I need to watch a couple of shows and have some dessert,’ and then you end up staying up until 11, and the baby wakes up an hour later. But you needed that for yourself!”

Roberts recalls one of her earliest memories after her son was born — he arrived early with medical complications and spent 18 days in the NICU. Within days of giving birth, Roberts was making daily trips alone on the ferry from Brooklyn to Manhattan to see her newborn at the hospital, while her husband stayed home with their daughter. She remembers sitting on the ferry one beautiful afternoon beneath bright September skies, so overwhelmed and exhausted that she couldn’t stop sobbing as the New York skyline drew closer.

She wants to be honest about what that felt like, so other moms might feel safe being honest, too.

“You don’t want to scare someone who is having their second,” she says. “But you want to validate their potential feelings: This could be tough, and if it is tough, that’s totally okay, and you’re not alone.”

“I would say it took at least six months for me to feel like I wasn’t completely drowning, and probably a good year before I was like, ‘Okay, this is more normal than it is whoa,’” Walden says. Her daughter is 4 now, and her son is almost 2. “Now I’ve got this whole little routine. We’re doing fine.”

It took about a year for Yen’s family to find a new equilibrium, too: “By that time, there was more of a rhythm, and my son was more consistently sleeping through the night, so everything felt more doable. We were balancing work-life responsibilities much better.” Her boys are 3 and 7 now, she says, and they’re extremely close. “They are so precious with each other, and my heart bursts with joy when I see them sometimes.” She pauses. “Well — you just have to make sure they’re not hungry, angry or tired.”

Fapohunda describes this season of her life as “beautiful chaos,” and she (mostly) relishes it. “It’s wonderful. I love seeing my boys together.” They’ve developed a special bond, she says; recently, her older boy told her at bedtime, I love my baby. In those moments, she says, she thinks about how grateful she is, how “I would do anything for my family.” She laughs: “And then, in the next breath, I’m like, I am so tired.”

A few nights ago, I put my son in his crib and poked my head into his big sister’s room. Her dad had already tucked her in, but she was still awake, so I sat on the edge of her bed to say good night. I was thinking about that first night at home with her brother, and how little I’d known then about all that would change, and all that would remain constant. Nearly three years later, my daughter doesn’t remember much of life before her little brother was part of it.

Finalist for a National Magazine Award in feature writing, 2024

Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, finalist in local reporting, 2016

Education Writers Association National Awards, first place in single topic news or feature writing, 2016

MDDC Press Association Editorial Contest, first place/Best in Show in feature writing/profile, 2016

Maryland Rehabilitation Association, Excellence in Media award, 2015

Fairfax County Domestic Violence Community, Media Award of Excellence, 2014

Virginia Press Association, first place in feature writing, 2011

Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, finalist in local reporting, 2010

University of Maryland, B.A. in English

Caitlin Gibson is a feature writer focused on families, parenting and children.

Caitlin Gibson

There's no way to prepare for the chaos of a second child

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Illustration by Agnes Lee/The Washington Post; iStock

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Perspective: The singular chaos of a second child

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