The way my husband communicated to me that I had won my campaign to have a third child was via a greeting card when our existing children were roughly 3 and 1. The card featured a painting of a large bear — that was me! — and three smaller ones. “Three bears,” he had written inside the card with characteristic economy. I remember triumphantly texting a photo of this card to my mom-friend chat, with whom many texts had been exchanged about the relative merits of having three children.
This victory was the culmination of lobbying that took the form of many “jokes” and a smaller number of serious conversations that began shortly after our second baby was born. This second baby would lie serenely next to me in bed in our sunny room, and I felt sublimely content when I looked at her. She was a little velvety creature with a lot of black hair and very fat cheeks and tufts of fur on the tips of her ears, just like her sister at that age. Who wouldn’t want another one? My husband, who was my co-parent and the primary breadwinner for our household, wasn’t so sure. Our financial situation, good in the statistical, on-paper sense, felt rocky in San Francisco, where the state had just put the low-income threshold for a family of four at the bananas figure of $117,000/year.
