When is one more never enough?

I suppose one more is never enough when you’re eating Pringles or Lays potato chips or blueberries…mmm blueberries. Or trying to get in one more minute of sleep. Or hunting for a new pair of swanky shoes. Or if you’re Kenny Chesney, it’s when you’re drinking tequila. It’s endless.

Here’s the thing: for me, one more child is never enough. Whoa! What?!

This stretch of time shortly before the Fourth of July all the way through the lucky 13^th of July is a sorry, sappy and sore time for me. No, that’s being a bit dramatic. It’s not like this every year; only some years, like this one. Sometimes the events of this stretch of time 16 years ago slap me in the face just like it happened all over again. It’s amazing how death and dying can seem so distant and foggy one day and so real and raw on another day, even years later.

Let me bring this back around for you:

On the afternoon of July 3, 1995, I found myself seated on the lawn of my uncle’s house in New York with a look of total disbelief as the ambulance jetted off to the Albany hospital carrying the motionless body of my oldest brother, Matt. This memory is so vivid in its every detail: how the grass felt under me, how the air wasn’t quite stuffy hot, but wasn’t cool, and the faces of my two remaining brothers. I remember looking at my older brother, Jon, both of us staring at each other in total shock. I remember thinking, “What the f--- just happened?”

I’m going to leave that memory right there. Suffice it to say I was left with this one, distasteful - yet defining - thought that I’ve continued to carry in the back of my mind: my two remaining brothers. And it didn’t, and still doesn’t, feel like enough.

So after trying on the brilliant gown of motherhood, I’ve quickly become sold on the idea of surrounding myself with children. Till the day I die. In fact, I desperately thirst for more children (a wee bit pathetic, I know). I want to reproduce until my body can no longer handle that responsibility. I want, I want, I want…one more.

My husband told me in a heated discussion one night, “One more will NEVER be enough for you!” And it is so true. It won’t. I crave the Brangelina family. Adopted, my own, whatever.

Selfish? Yes. Trying to fill a void within myself? Most definitely. But I want one more.

And then one more after that.