There’s Nothing Quite as Invasive as the Dreaded Baby Fever

The symptoms are innocuous at first. You might notice an inability to pass the tiny baby clothes at the store without a lingering gaze and an involuntary “Awwww!” Then there’s the mental rearranging of your living space: you may start wondering things like Is that closet big enough to be considered a really small bedroom? and Googling things like How expensive would it be to convert the basement and Best places to buy bunk beds. There are the unexpected pinpricks of jealousy at the TikToks and Instagram reels of cute sex reveals and birth announcements — and the fact that they suddenly seem to be cropping up everywhere.

I’m talking about baby fever. It’s insidious. It’s invasive. And once you have it, it’s hard to get rid of.

It usually happens around the time your youngest child is 2 or 3; when your “baby” starts doing things that are, well, not so babyish. Like speaking in full (fairly) coherent sentences and having opinions. Or when you catch a glimpse of them and they just look so mature — like when your little boy gets his hair cut and even though it was just to fix his baby mullet it actually made him look way older and you can’t help but weep “Where did my baby go?!” into the top of his head as he sits there in utter confusion.

Just me? Oh.

It’s that unsettling ache inside when you realize that you no longer have a baby — and that you may never have one of your very own again. Which leads into an involuntary reminiscence of the warm weight of a newborn cradled in your arms, sleeping like a perfect little cherub, smelling like only a newborn smells; those first gummy, joyful smiles; those teeny-tiny fingers and toes. Then you scroll through your photos of your other kids at that age, and the overwhelming love and nostalgia hits you like a tidal wave.

This is what makes baby fever so dangerous. It causes a sort of amnesia, wherein you block out everything but the wonderful, lovely moments of parenting a newborn. My theory is that it’s some sort of built-in biological mechanism that ensures we don’t “nope” ourselves right out of having a second or a third or a fourth kid — because if everyone was one and done, the human population wouldn’t be nearly as robust. A case of baby fever will gloss right over the sleepless nights, the projectile poops, the leaky boobs. And even if you do happen to think of those things, your mind just follows them up with ” … but babies!”

Right after the birth of our fourth son, I was done. While the whole thing was still fresh, I felt like our family was complete. But my husband never got the vasectomy he promised to get (thanks, guys at work who regaled him with over-exaggerated vasectomy horror stories) and when my baby turned two — like clockwork — my brain started whispering, You could still have one more.

The yearning for another baby, the yearning that I thought was gone, slowly but surely reappeared — like a long-forgotten shipwreck poking up from receding waters. Even though my husband was completely opposed to having another baby, we were still technically able. And let me tell you this: for someone who struggled with infertility like I did, being “technically able” to have a baby and not doing it felt almost torturous.

At first I could ease the baby fever symptoms with reasonable arguments: namely that kids are expensive and we didn’t actually need five of them. But as is always the case, my disease progressed until it inevitably affected my logical thinking. Then it was more like, “Sure, kids cost an arm and a leg … but who needs money when you have love?“

Thankfully, I didn’t succumb to baby fever (that time), and in hindsight, I’m glad — because now that I have three teenagers and a tween in my house, eating up all my food and leaving dishes everywhere and calling me “bruh,” I can’t imagine adding another one to the mix. By some miracle I was cured of the condition, but every now and then, once in a blue moon, a symptom will pop up out of nowhere and make me paranoid that I’m coming down with it all over again. At least now, though, I can just remind myself that I’m forty-freaking-three and not some childbearing spring chicken. That seems to do the trick.

While baby fever and its progressively-louder cacophony of symptoms is a condition that exists in your head, it will most definitely affect your heart too. It will conjure up every gushy emotion that you felt when you last had a newborn, and will tell your head that you neeeeeed to feel those emotions again. It will infiltrate, then proliferate, until it starts to feel more like an obsession. Even when you get over it, there’s absolutely no guarantee it won’t reoccur. But for as serious and relentless as baby fever can be, it isn’t contagious. You cannot give it to your partner — and sometimes, that’s a blessing in disguise.