If you knew your baby would be your last, would you have held your stomach a little tighter? Would you have looked at your body with greater admiration that it could grow an entire human in just a few months and change your body and yourself forever? Would you have taken more time to enjoy your changing shape and sat with yourself a little longer to appreciate these changes? Would you have conceived this life differently, or sooner or later than you did? Would you have gotten more things in line before this new life came to be or not spent so much time worrying?

Would you have read more or been more confident about how you were going to parent? If you’d known this baby would be your last, would you have enjoyed the pain of birth more and ached to feel every pain that labor brought? Would you have chosen to birth differently or reveled in all the decisions you made to birth the way you did?

If you’d known this baby would be your last, would you have written letters to them? Would you have recorded your secret thoughts to yourself and your baby so you could cherish them over the years when they faded from memory? Would you have cried a little more at the beauty in the world or fought harder to protect them from the stresses of our world? Would you have made more plans for things you wanted to do with your baby and tried harder to fulfill them or would you have sat back and savored the love and quiet that this new life brought to you?

If you’d known this baby would be your last, would you have tried to find greater peace in who you are to share that confidence with your baby? Would you have learned a new skill?  Would you have given more of yourself or saved a bit to celebrate just for you? Would you have worried less about having the perfect nursery and thought more deeply about the childhood you’d help your baby create? 

If you’d known this baby would be your last, what relationships would you have tried to build or gently let slip away? Would you have traveled somewhere new or visited a place with special meaning? Would you make plans with your new baby when they arrived or as they grew older and shared with them why it was special to you? Would you think of special places you’d want to take them at different milestones in their life? Would you reminisce about special memories in your own childhood and make plans to implement similar ones into your babies? Would you dream up new traditions or different ways of raising this child from previous ones with older children? Would you take previous parenting regrets and repair that pain with this new person? Would you promise to give yourself more grace? Would you actually?

If you knew this baby would be your last, did you come to that decision peacefully? Do you feel sadness that it is your last? Or do you feel so fulfilled that maybe one is simply the perfect number? Did you struggle to conceive or have losses and carrying this baby is repairing some of that pain? 

Allow yourself to feel many feelings as you ponder these questions and seek closure in  some and motivation in others. Feel all the feelings and find ways to avoid regrets. This last baby brings so much joy and unanswered questions, some that you may never answer. Find the joy and wonder in that. For this life is just beginning and you created it.