Age gaps run in my family. I grew up with a sister eight years older than me, and have since gained sisters 17 and 20 years younger. My father is 15 years younger than his oldest brother. There were seven years between my parents. The Frizzells treat years the way sheep treat stone walls, inconvenient lumps to be leapt over to reach the greener grass. And so it was perhaps fairly inevitable that, all being well, there will be seven years between my own two children.
As with all personal experiences, it’s almost impossible to judge what it means to have a large age gap between your children because it probably means you haven’t tried the alternative—you certainly cannot compare a large and small age gap between the same children—so what I am about to say is based solely and entirely on my own anecdotal observations. I haven’t been sitting at your dinner table, watching your children fight over stickers, or Pink Panthering after you on vacation, watching you put two toddlers to bed. This is not me subtly trying to tell you to have kept your legs shut a little longer, I promise.
My older sister and I didn’t suffer the traditional slings and arrows of sibling rivalry because we were always so different. By the time I was starting primary school, she had already left; when she started going out with her friends, I was still eating Monster Munch in a sleeping bag on the sofa and watching The Jungle Book; when I was potty-training, she was putting on shows with her friends at sleepovers. We are emotionally close but have never had a physical fight, never had the same friends. Strangers never even guess that we’re related.
By the time my baby is born, my son will be well into Year Two at school. As a result, he has friends, can read, is occupied for free out of the house for at least six hours a day, gets a free hot meal for lunch, and, when things are going well, cycles home telling me facts about the Great Fire of London or number pairs or how to build a trap for a Roblox. I’m neither so naive nor so amnesiac to say that this will give me hours of cozy, restful time at home with a newborn, filled with cuddles and cups of tea and interesting radio series. I’ve had a baby before, remember. I know that a huge part of having a child under one is rubbing the grit and dust of extreme sleep deprivation out of your weeping eyes as you try to clean up vomit, determine why they’re screaming, and wash your armpits before heading out to yet another medical appointment. But at least I will be able to do all of that without also being hit in the face with a plastic hammer by an incontinent toddler demanding I draw him yet another rhino soldier from Disney’s Robin Hood. People who can simultaneously attend to the needs of a newborn and a toddler have my unerring admiration; anyone working in recruitment should recognize their panoply of transferable skills immediately.
Because my body, partner, and life conspired to leave this large age gap between my children, I’m also having my second baby well after a lot of my friends have come to the end of their reproductive sprees—meaning I’ve been overwhelmed with kind and considerate offers of cots, clothes, strollers, slings, and all the other paraphernalia that is vital for a few years and then takes up an inordinate amount of space thereafter. I have long argued that England could halt all production of baby-related stuff for at least a year before we come even close to running short, so this hand-me-down situation is delightful to me. God knows how other parents have kept everything so clean.
Perhaps the greatest boon, however, is the joy and interest my son is—so far, at least—taking in pregnancy, babies, and birth. He has always been a fan of babies (well, apart from a very angry few months during the nadir of toddlerhood, where he tried to kick them in playgrounds and ignored their wails). But his is not just a simple cooing excitement over holding them or making them giggle. He wants to know the facts. He loves hearing about the amniotic fluid, the placenta, the colostrum and the fontanelle. He asks about their eyelids and lungs and the development of their hearing. He talks into my belly button and asks what vegetable the baby is as big as now, and I’ve spent at least one journey to school explaining in fairly thorough detail the mechanics of cervical dilation. He wants to sleep in his future sibling’s room and to give them a bath and to read them bedtime stories. Whether any of this will happen is, of course, unknowable at this stage, but it is very nice to see a young boy express the nurturing instincts of a knee-height doula.
This article was originally published on Vogue.com.