She’s been told she doesn’t have a ‘proper family’ and was even accused of ‘child abuse’. Now, a furious JO ELVIN demands… why should mums like me have to defend our decision to have only one child?

My kind and caring doctor carefully explained my options. Although I had my daughter, Evie, quite quickly when I was 35, having a second baby turned out not to be so easy.

By then, at the ripe old age of 39, I had been trying without success for almost a year. The reason? It turned out that my fertility had taken a huge nosedive.

“We can get you pregnant,” the doctor reassured me. “But just not, of course.”

When he brought up the subject of IVF treatment, I felt an unexpected feeling. Relief. Because honestly, I had already mentally left the conversation. As soon as he told me that my uterus had posted its own ‘closure’ sign, I had made up my mind.

Yes, I had booked the appointment to give our daughter a little brother or sister – something everyone around me seemed adamant I should do.

But at that moment I felt with every fiber of my being that having one healthy child was my life story – and I was happy with that.

Dress it up as ‘fate’ or just call it ‘getting old’; Either way, the decision was taken out of my hands – and I was at peace with it.

What I didn’t anticipate, however, was that so many other people would be unhappy with it. Not at all. Throughout Evie’s childhood (she’s almost 19 now), I was regularly challenged with judgmental questions and truly outrageous, sweeping statements about my one and only.

There was a colleague who told me that one child “isn’t a real family”; another stated that having one child was “a form of child abuse.”

There were also endless questions about whether we would have more children or, even more surprising, “Why do you only have one?” and, “Can’t you have more?”

For all anyone knew, I could have been struggling with the pain of multiple miscarriages or a serious illness. I wasn’t, but that still doesn’t make these questions and judgments okay.

“Why do you only have one child?” – as if my daughter’s existence is only valid when we have a human in the house again? The nerve.

Some of these comments made me waver at times. Was it wrong to have only one child?

I thought about my own childhood. I have two brothers and a sister and I love them, but we’re not exactly The Waltons. We get on very well – my sister visited from Brisbane just last month – but we are vastly different and not particularly intertwined in each other’s lives.

When my husband, Ross, and I met in our 20s, we both saw children—one or two, but I wasn’t fixated on a number—in our future.

But since we were both focused on our journalism careers, we were in no rush. In fact, we hesitated until we were in our thirties, when we realized that maybe we should go through with it.

When we first decided to try for our daughter, I remember Ross making a lot of jokes about all the “exercises” we had to do with reproduction. But it only took four months to conceive Evie; instead, poor Ross ended up feeling nauseous, migraine-like, bloated, gassy and in no mood to even hold hands for months.

We fought more then than ever before in our marriage. Pregnancy wasn’t the euphoric wonderland it was described to me in those annoyingly insincere baby magazines.

One night, when I was about six months pregnant and pinned to the couch, Ross went out with cute, non-pregnant people — and I ugly cried while watching ET. . . sobbing, like ET was real and he was my dog ​​or something.

But we got through it. I was excited to meet my daughter. So I sucked down the Gaviscon, ate away the 24-hour nausea with white bread and Marmite, and slept every spare second I could, because when I did sleep I didn’t feel uncomfortable or irritate Ross.

Of course, it was all totally worth it. The second Evie was lifted out of me, via emergency caesarean section, the nauseating feeling of heartburn was gone.

But like all new moms, I was in for a challenging few weeks.

I needed medication for alarmingly high blood pressure caused by gestational hypertension. Add to that the lack of sleep and the ever-present fear that I was doing everything wrong.

Why is she crying? I fed her, I changed her, I excited her, she slept, I did it all again, and she still won’t stop crying.

Does she hate me? I’m an idiot who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Why did they let me bring this little person home to keep alive?’

And yet, in the midst of all this, when Evie was only a few weeks old, people started asking when I was planning to have another.

“Let me get these out of the diapers first!” I told my mother, trying to make my frustration sound like a joke.

From then on, all I heard from friends and family members, even from random strangers in stores, was that this baby wasn’t a real baby without the addition of another baby.

“Oh, you should give her a brother or a sister.”

“She’ll be spoiled if you don’t.”

“She won’t know how to handle it.”

‘I was an only child and I will never forgive my parents for that.’

“She will be that child who doesn’t know how to share and who no one will like.”

“She’ll be lonely when you die.”

“She must be weird.”

I could have thrown them all through a window.

By the time Evie was a year old, I started to dread being asked if I had children.

I took a deep breath, put on a grin and simply said – to invariably surprised faces – that I had one child and no, I wasn’t going to have any more, and no, there wasn’t really a ‘reason’. .

That said, by the time Evie was about 18 months old, and I felt like I could emerge from my new life under the sea again to take a few gulps of air, I pitched the idea of ​​another child to Ross. .

He wasn’t completely against it, but he was now a man who had seen things like rivers of diarrhea at three in the morning and the Pregnant Woman. He was completely happy with his only beloved daughter and was in no hurry to add to the chaos.

Strangely enough, no one had ever turned to him to whisper about the terrible evil of having ‘just that one’ child. Absolutely no one. Of course, I had much more normal reasons for wanting to have a second child. I loved my little girl so much that I was curious to see what else we could create.

I really thought it would be great for her to have a sibling that she loves and loves. With my 38th birthday approaching, Ross gave the idea one thumbs up (note, not two).

I consulted the ovulation kit again and we got to work. Cut to ten months where nothing was happening and I was talking to my doctor about what it would take to get pregnant again. Now everyone has to make their own choices in these matters, and I probably would feel very differently if we were talking about my attempt to have my first child.

But I knew immediately that IVF was simply not the path I wanted to take. I wasn’t ready for the physical regimen. I wasn’t ready for the emotional lows I had seen so many disappointed couples experience. And honestly, I wasn’t willing to bear the cost.

You’ve probably already guessed that Ross couldn’t convince himself to give up trying for baby number 2. He nodded, shrugged and said how much he loved our little family just the way it was. And I couldn’t agree more.

I did not feel heartbroken by this turn of events, which in itself speaks volumes.

I truly had an overwhelming certainty that the universe had made a decision, and I could now continue raising my only, precious child – a privilege, I know, that has eluded many people I care about. Unbearably, there are two families in my life who have buried children.

So Evie grew up with the dedicated and undivided time and attention of her two parents – not to mention the finances.

As for the idea that her status as an only child has turned her into a withering wallflower or a spoiled brat: she was always the kind of kid who rushed to the kids’ club on vacation; When she was seven, she told me she could “make friends in minutes.”

I didn’t have that confidence at the same age. It fills me with pride to see her holding her own in conversations with adults she’s just met, and I’m convinced it’s because she grew up with a lot of adult company.

To my relief, she was never one of those kids who begged for a brother or sister.

“I like it that it’s just us,” she told my father when he asked if she ever wanted a brother or sister. And yet the criticism continued – for me, and for mothers like me.

A fellow “one and done” mom I know was once told that it would have been better for her not to have had children. I’m sure the women who don’t have children would be laughing, considering the barrage of judgments that constantly come their way.

I also have friends who have been punished for having three or four children. ‘Really selfish’ and ‘ecologically irresponsible’ to overpopulate the world in this way, apparently.

So if you want a pat on the back from society, or just want to go about your business without making unsolicited comments about your reproductive status, you better make sure you have a respectable, decent pair. Preferably one of each gender. OK? Good.

In terms of “sliding door” moments, of course I sometimes wonder what another mini-me or Ross would have been like. But it just wasn’t meant to be – and that’s fine.

Now that I’m 54, people only have to look at me to know that I’m too old to have any more children. So finally I’m relieved to say they’re not asking anymore.

As for Evie, she is kind, she is smart and the one-liners she gives me are often vicious, but so funny that I can only be proud. She’s weird, the dissenters were right. And thank goodness, because those are the best people.

She is my favorite person in the world and I would run in front of a bus for her.

I love my one and only girl.