I didn’t want to think that mothering would be like my first year teaching. By October of that first year in the classroom, I was starting most mornings crying in the shower at 5 a.m. Fortunately, my son’s first year had no such dramatic depression, but what did stick with me was the expectation that I’d get a do-over.

The one thing that gets most first-year teachers through to June is the idea that the second year couldn’t possibly be as hard. Think of all the mistakes I won’t make! All the simple things I’ll change that will make such a huge difference! All the strategies I’ll have! New students! No one will know all the things I don’t know!

I happily enjoyed a wonderful pregnancy, but as soon as my son was deemed to be in a breech position, from which he would not flip, I started to question my choices and make mental notes about what to do differently in the future. Next time I will actively create the ideal fetal position. I will never slouch on the couch. I will prepare more seriously for a natural childbirth. I’ll skip the birth center (that transferred me to the hospital) and go with a lay midwife instead. Surely we can avoid a repeat C-section.

There was even second-guessing on the name. At the last minute, we decided our family name choice was too common, and it didn’t fit the baby. But we had no clear list of next favorites, just my husband’s feeling that “Elliott” was growing on him ever since I included it as a possible middle name; The Baby Name Wizard listed it as a relative of Dexter (which I rejected because it reminded me of a former student). For weeks, even months, my husband and I looked at each other and wondered if Elliott was our son’s real name, as perplexed about its fit as we were about finding ourselves so unsure. Next time I’ll have a great list. I’ll do serious research. I’ll come up with something unique but not too quirky.

It took my milk a week to come in, and after we’d established breastfeeding, I told myself next time I’d have no problem. I’ll have the pump ready, and I won’t need to wait for a lactation consultant to tell me if I’m dry. I’ll just squeeze and know! And after a natural childbirth, certainly my body will get to work faster on milk production.

Then once my son was a few months old and still couldn’t self-soothe, I thought, Next time I’ll try harder to calm the baby without always rushing to nurse him. I thought this again when he was 22 months old and I was sleepily raising my shirt each time he woke up at night pleading, “Wanna nurse you. More nurse!”

When my son developed terrible separation anxiety at seven months old, just as I was starting to want to venture out of the house without him once in a while, I made a plan for the next baby. I’ll have a sitter with our family from the beginning as a mother’s helper so we won’t have to look for someone the baby doesn’t know. She’ll (because of course my second baby would be a girl!) be comfortable with the sitter already.

For a while when I was a child, I thought to myself that I would be the best baby ever, until one day I realized that I had already been a baby, and it wasn’t going to happen again. I went along in a similar kind of haze for months after my son was born until he started to talk and walk and light up around older kids. Watching his joy playing with his cousins, I considered that if he’d had an older sibling to entertain him as a baby, maybe he would have had an easier time when I occasionally left the room.

Then it really hit me. Never again would I be a first-time mom. I would always have Elliott around when and if I had another child. And it would never be Elliott’s chance to experience being a baby all over again. He wasn’t going to flunk and be turned back into a newborn to repeat the year in another person’s house, not even if that person were a new me. He was stuck living with the choices I made the first time around.

The same is true in teaching: those kids will never have another tenth grade year. I was it for them, their sophomore year English teacher. I might remain fossilized in their minds, but at the same time, I knew that I could start over the next year with a clean slate. The new crop of kids wouldn’t know that I didn’t require notebooks last year or that I hadn’t made a no-gum rule on the first day. I could reinvent myself, at least until former students came by to gasp, “Hey, you got carpet! You painted the walls!” But those moments usually served me well. Kids only came by to say nice things, never to complain about whatever they’d spent the previous year complaining about.

Elliott, however, didn’t turn in his locker combination in June expecting to have a new homeroom teacher come September. It’s still me. I can try out new things and create new rituals and get surprised by how much more immediately pliable he is than I. But I still doubt the effects of everything I’ve done up to this moment. And I still have a hard time imagining that if we are blessed with a second baby, I’ll have to do that gestating and mothering at the same time as mothering Elliott. It’s like being handed an additional “prep,” or kind of class. “You mean I have to do World Lit II and American Lit and go back to teach World Lit I again also? But I don’t even remember World Lit I!”

I thought I had Baby 101 down, but I realize now it was really just Elliott 101, and he’s constantly changing the course title and syllabus. A different baby would be, well, a different baby. Friends with second children already have demonstrated how different siblings can be. Oh, and firstborns don’t just pause at your open door holding a bathroom pass to check on the décor of your room; they are always around, needing to pee or eat or play or just get a hug.

The best teaching does not look forward to the day of no mistakes. Those don’t exist. Instead, great teachers take note of things that didn’t work, not only in the interest of doing a better job when that novel comes around next year but also in the interest of striving to make tomorrow meaningful for everyone, especially if today wasn’t such a hit. And if the day was spectacular, wise teachers enjoy the buzz and file away the recipe, or at least an idea about which ingredients added just the right punch.

Each day teaching provided me countless opportunities to question how I talked to students, how I boosted their confidence or inadvertently shut them down, to say nothing of wondering whether I actually taught them any subject matter. Taking stock of disappointments and sources of pride helps anyone live more intentionally. Reading parenting books, talking to other people about their approaches, taking classes: all are useful activities. Reflection is important if it’s not an end in itself. But as any meditation student knows, if I am always looking toward a vague notion of the hope-it’s-different future by way of wishing I could change my past, I’m not doing any justice to the present.

As parents – and teachers – we might always wish we had more time to do more reading and preparation. We might both wish we had more control over a situation and also feel too much weight resting on each decision we make. We might be thankful we addressed a problem in a particular way once and avoided the issue altogether the next time around. But I doubt I will later on look back to my time with my toddler son and think, “I wish I’d spent more time fantasizing about your hypothetical sibling and my repeat performance as new-and-improved mom.” After just 22 super-fast months, I think I can safely project that, as my son gets older, I will wish I spent more time fully focused on just spending time with the real boy in front of me.

For actually experiencing each moment, there is no do-over.

Jessica Haney has published poems in Earth’s Daughters, Court Green, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly. She previously managed and wrote content for The Feminist Majority Foundation Online (http://www.feminist.org) and has published in Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources. Until the birth of her son in 2006, Jessica taught English and advised the literary magazine at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, where she also wrote curriculum and worked on issues of diversity in advanced classes. A native of Michigan now living in Northern Virginia, Jessica is a member of the Bethesda Writer’s Center in Maryland. She holds an M.A. in English and an M.A. in women’s studies from the University of Cincinnati.