Before I had any children, it always seemed to me that parents didn't do enough, which was easy for me to say from the outside.

I once had a co-worker who used to bitch about her pregnancy all the time: how tired she was and how huge she was and how in pain she was and blah blah blah blah blah. And I thought, "What a whiner. How hard can it be? You gain a little weight and then in nine months it's all over. And at the end of it, you have an adorable baby that grows up into a fun little kid."

I didn't count on that "little weight" shifting all of my internal organs out of the way to make room for itself: pressing on my bladder, so that I had to visit the bathroom every 30 minutes and pressing on my lungs, so that I was constantly out of breath. I didn't count on morning sickness that lasted all day, every day; or on being so exhausted I could barely function; or on paralyzing migraines; or on joints so painfully loose that I could barely dress and certainly couldn't walk up stairs; or on sugar in my urine, which meant gestational diabetes tests that involved ingesting huge quantities of disgustingly sweet medical orange drink and the removal of many, many vials of blood.

And after it was all over, and my son was born, I didn't count on being so physically beat up from a vaginal delivery that at the six week post-partum visit, I was screaming in pain when the doctor examined me. Before the delivery, I didn't think I'd be able to go two weeks without sex, so I didn't count on not being able to have sex at all for months and not being completely comfortable doing so for a year. I didn't count on post-partum depression in the form of massive anxiety attacks: anxiety attacks that sent me to the emergency room thinking I was having a heart attack. I didn't count on more migraines: migraines that made the left side of my face and arm feel numb, migraines that would take MRIs and ultrasounds and more vials and vials of blood to diagnose. I didn't count on a baby that cried all the time or a toddler that couldn't learn to talk and required evaluation after evaluation and hours and hours of therapy. I didn't count on a year without sleep. I didn't count on not even starting to feel like my non-anxious, non-depressed, non-aching, non-sick self again for such a very long time.

When my son was a year and a half, I began, just began, to start feeling normal again. He was finally sleeping, so I was finally sleeping; I had lost my pregnancy weight; my body had healed; I had weaned him, and the migraines and anxiety had disappeared with the breastfeeding hormones.

And then, before my son was two, I found I was unexpectedly pregnant with my daughter. I cried when I saw the pregnancy test results; it had all been so hard, so unbelievably unexpectedly hard, and I was so scared to face all that hell again so soon. But there was no question my husband and I wanted this second baby. It felt like destiny: not the timing I would have chosen, but she was meant to be. And if I had to go through hell again to have her, so be it.

After she was born, I knew I was through having children. Shortly after my daughter was born, my son was diagnosed autism, meaning the chances I would have another child with autism, another child who would need the level of energy and time and resources as my son, were between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20. I was over 35, which brought its own set of risks, both to me and the baby. Between my husband's job loss, my pregnancy and my son's needs, our finances were shaky enough that another child would cause us to lose our house. My husband's sex addiction had come to light during my pregnancy with my daughter and our relationship was still reeling from the consequences. And most of all, I was physically, mentally and emotionally at my limit with two. Nothing about us felt like it would survive a third child: not our marriage, not our finances, not our mental health, not the well-being of our two existing children.

So, I asked my doctor about birth control options; she recommended an IUD, which was as effective as surgery, but less invasive. A few months after I got the IUD, before my daughter's first birthday, I was feeling sick and exhausted. One day my back went into spasms that caused me so much pain that I just lay on the floor, unable to get up or move or take care of the kids. I'd been through this twice now, and I knew how I felt: I felt pregnant.

I took a home pregnancy test and sobbed. I was that one in a thousand statistical blip where the IUD failed. I called my husband at work, hysterical. Mark told me he would support me through whatever I decided and encouraged me to meditate on it. I searched my heart and found that the last two pregnancies felt meant to be, even though I was scared and overwhelmed when I got pregnant with my daughter, she felt like destiny. This didn't feel like destiny; it felt like another cheap shot from God. And He wasn't going to help me, and that voice inside me said only, "Know yourself."

I looked at my daughter and thought about how many special challenges she had growing up in her brother's shadow; he was older, but it will always be harder for him to navigate the world than it is for her, and already that dynamic was difficult for her, for us, to navigate. I thought about how much more she would need to take on her own care, as a toddler, and I wept. I thought about losing the house and making the kids, especially my son who is so sensitive to change, move. I thought about the stress the pregnancy and child would put on an already crumbling marriage. I thought of the kids without their father. And I thought about another daughter or son, one I knew I would love as much as the two I had, and one they would grow to love too.

I made an appointment with my OB and her ultrasound confirmed a pregnancy. I saw the little heartbeat flicker on the screen, and I ached. I had hoped there would be something wrong: that it was an ectopic pregnancy or a blighted ovum, that I felt pregnant but the baby was already too damaged to survive. The baby seemed healthy so far, but I also knew that getting pregnant with an IUD in meant I had a higher risk of miscarriage and birth defects (higher even than what I knew was an already high risk). As I slumped down, tears rolling into my lap, my OB gently asked what I wanted to do, and I told her I wanted to terminate the pregnancy.

We scheduled the surgery, and a few weeks later, I wasn't pregnant anymore. I still cry whenever I think of that little flickering heartbeat. I don't know what that flicker might have become. I didn't wait to find out if it would fade out itself in a miscarriage or be born disabled or typically developing or terminally ill or perfectly healthy. I didn't know if that child would grow up to be institutionalized or to cure cancer or if it would grow up at all. I only knew that, as much as I would, and did, love it, it would rip our lives apart. And I knew, at the time, I didn't have the strength or the faith to bear that burden on top of everything else. I knew that I chose to sacrifice what might have been to protect what already existed: my mental and physical health, a marriage being tenuously rebuilt and above all, the two children who needed me and a stable home. I did what I felt I had to, I did what I could, I did what I felt was right, and in the eyes of those outside my life, I'm sure I didn't do enough.