My Worst Fear = Hub`s Greatest Wish

Little Son will be four years old next month. Daughter was about this age when we started having the "one more baby?" discussions.

And right on schedule, Hub is getting those big moony eyes whenever he sees an infant.

"Wouldn`t it be so great....?"

"....to have what feels like a killer hangover for nine months, to get my stomach and my thinning uterine walls cut open again, to have another six months of post-partum depression and then breastfeed for a couple of years, while you work long hours and travel? Ah, no -- that would SUCK."

People have asked us whose idea it was to have our third kid. It`s funny -- no one ever asked us that for the first or second kid, but when I was pregnant with Little Son, it was open season for invasive personal questions. "Was it planned?" came up a lot, too.

The truth is, it was originally our babysitter`s idea for us to have a third child. We had a great Fillipina babysitter/housekeeper in Tokyo, and she especially loved little babies, and kept telling us how wonderful it would be if we had one more, until we started to see things her way. So she gets the credit for planting the idea in our heads.

This became a running joke -- I would make a serious face and tell intrusive strangers that our babysitter was really great and we were afraid she would quit, so we had to have another baby just to keep her. There are probably people out there in the world, telling the story of a crazy family they met in Tokyo, who had another child just to keep good help.

But it`s really no joke that Hub wants one more, now that I`ve decided my aging body won`t be going through that again.

"But you`re Catholic!" he says.

"Nice try. If I were a good Catholic, would I have married you?"

The most ironic part is that when Little Son was only six months old, we had a pregnancy scare, and Hub was singing a different tune.

Apparently, we got a defective home test. After a few minutes, NO lines appeared -- not even the control line. The instructions on the box say to throw it away if the control line doesn`t appear. But after an hour, I pulled it out of the trash to look at it one more time, and there were two extremely faint lines there.

Two lines. Everyone knows what that means. For better or for worse, it`s a sight that brings out strong emotions in anyone who beholds it.

"Umanai! It won`t be born," said Hub, over and over. "Umanai! It won`t be born, it won`t be born!"

Now, I am not pro-life, and I am a strong advocate of keeping abortion legal. But still, I deeply resented that Hub had already made a decision about something that was, after all, growing inside my body.

So we had a huge fight about it -- the last serious fight I remember having with Hub. He was adamant that we would not be having another baby so soon, and stormed out of the apartment.

I reached for the phone, and the first friend I called told me Hub was right and I was being unreasonable.

"How can you even think about having another baby so soon? Think of the time and the money involved -- it`s not fair to your kids. It`s not fair to your husband. It would be selfish of you to risk your marriage and family like that."

Okay, that particular friend had aborted her only pregnancy and never had any more, so I could understand where she was coming from. But I was surprised to get the same reaction from the next friend I called, a mother of two.

What happened, I wondered, to that old my body, my choice argument? Did it only apply if the woman was choosing abortion over childbirth, and not the other way around? Is abortion now the automatic "best" option for an unplanned pregnancy? Are the pro-lifers right: has the subtle bias among educated, middle class feminist women shifted from "pro-choice" to "pro-abortion?"

My informal poll, taken on my brief night of crisis, only surveyed three such women, and the third was decidely "pro-choice" in the original (and, I think, best) nuance of that slippery term. She tried to discern what I was thinking, and what I wanted to do, and took into account Hub`s reaction and my reaction to Hub`s reaction, and told me I needed to think everything through very carefully.

I don`t know for sure what I would have done had I really been pregnant, but fortunately, I was not. The next morning, I bought another test -- a different brand this time -- and it was clearly negative. The control line was dark as it was supposed to be, and no other line ever appeared. No baby in there, nothing to worry about -- yay, yipee, do a little happy dance, and then life went on.

But now, I think, if I showed Hub two lines on a pregnancy test, he wouldn`t say, "Umanai!" He would get those moony eyes, and get all happy, and start buying soft little clothes and toys again.

Um... how many more years left until menopause?