Age gaps run in my family. I grew up with a sister eight years older than me, and have since gained sisters 17 and 20 years younger. My father is 15 years younger than his oldest brother. There were seven years between my parents. The Frizzells treat years the way sheep treat stone walls, inconvenient lumps to be leapt over to reach the greener grass. And so it was perhaps fairly inevitable that, all being well, there will be seven years between my own two children.
As with all personal experiences, it’s almost impossible to judge what it means to have a large age gap between your children because it probably means you haven’t tried the alternative—you certainly cannot compare a large and small age gap between the same children—so what I am about to say is based solely and entirely on my own anecdotal observations. I haven’t been sitting at your dinner table, watching your children fight over stickers, or Pink Panthering after you on vacation, watching you put two toddlers to bed. This is not me subtly trying to tell you to have kept your legs shut a little longer, I promise.
My older sister and I didn’t suffer the traditional slings and arrows of sibling rivalry because we were always so different. By the time I was starting primary school, she had already left; when she started going out with her friends, I was still eating Monster Munch in a sleeping bag on the sofa and watching The Jungle Book; when I was potty-training, she was putting on shows with her friends at sleepovers. We are emotionally close but have never had a physical fight, never had the same friends. Strangers never even guess that we’re related.
By the time my baby is born, my son will be well into Year Two at school. As a result, he has friends, can read, is occupied for free out of the house for at least six hours a day, gets a free hot meal for lunch, and, when things are going well, cycles home telling me facts about the Great Fire of London or number pairs or how to build a trap for a Roblox. I’m neither so naive nor so amnesiac to say that this will give me hours of cozy, restful time at home with a newborn, filled with cuddles and cups of tea and interesting radio series. I’ve had a baby before, remember. I know that a huge part of having a child under one is rubbing the grit and dust of extreme sleep deprivation out of your weeping eyes as you try to clean up vomit, determine why they’re screaming, and wash your armpits before heading out to yet another medical appointment. But at least I will be able to do all of that without also being hit in the face with a plastic hammer by an incontinent toddler demanding I draw him yet another rhino soldier from Disney’s Robin Hood. People who can simultaneously attend to the needs of a newborn and a toddler have my unerring admiration; anyone working in recruitment should recognize their panoply of transferable skills immediately.