Why I’m Having Only One Kid
Mira Chaudhry writes about the decision to have only one child in a culture that always expects more.
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Why I’m Having Only One Kid
I decided in the quietest way possible, which is to say I decided alone. There was no declaration, no dramatic conversation with my husband over candlelight, no tidy moment where the future arranged itself into something legible. My son was asleep in the next room. The house was finally still. And I thought, with a clarity that startled me: this is enough. Not “this is all I can manage,” not “this is what I will settle for,” but something far more dangerous: this is enough.
I did not say it out loud. Even now, years later, I sometimes feel the urge to whisper it, as if the walls themselves might disapprove. Because where I come from, ‘enough’ is a suspicious word. In South Asian families and communities, enough is rarely the goal. More is. More children, more sacrifice, more adjustment, more patience, more endurance. A woman’s life is not measured in the neat boundaries of her own desires but in how expansively she can stretch to accommodate everyone else’s. You are taught, gently at first and then with increasing firmness, that your capacity to give is your greatest virtue. And what greater proof of that virtue than motherhood, multiplied?