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Being pregnant, giving birth, and dealing with those first few newborn months can be nothing short of torturous. If you had an idyllic pregnancy, maybe your delivery was a nightmare. No problems with delivery? You might have been blessed with the world’s most colicky child. While welcoming your firstborn into the world is a life-changing, beautiful and heart-warming experience, many of those early days can be downright hairy.

So why do so many people opt to have a second (or third) kid? I was certainly someone who swore off having more children after my breech baby was born via C-section and I experienced awful side effects from the drugs they gave me during the surgery. My son then chose not to sleep for more than an hour at a time for the next four and a half months solid. Four and a half months. My husband and I started showing early signs of psychosis from sleep deprivation. We pleaded with our pediatrician for solutions as our screaming child chipped away at our ability to function.

But here I am, pregnant for a second time. And I am willing to go through it all over again – the good, the bad, and the torture. Friends who’ve been through it all say that the reason you choose to even think about having more children is that you forget: The birth is fleeting and you forget how much pain you endured. And they say that the sleepless nights during that fourth trimester don’t imprint on the brain because you were so tired and have so few memories of what you went through.

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