Once, in town to help me take care of our 6-month-old while her son was traveling, my mother-in-law and I watched a movie about a woman whose dad is dying. Nodding toward the baby asleep on my chest, she leaned in and whispered to me: “You don’t want her to have to deal with your death all by herself.”

She was kidding, I think. But 14 months later, I gave birth again. It was intense, insane, having two kids under 2 in a tiny New York apartment. Our younger kid was born in May, and my husband’s job that year meant he was on the road almost nonstop from June through August. We hardly survived the whir and wreck of it.

But I love babies, their smells and weight and texture. I’m embarrassed by what a cliché I am when it comes to my children, but they are my favorite people in the world. For years, my husband reminded me very calmly that we had neither the time nor space nor money for more children — especially after I’d joke about watching a YouTube video on do-it-yourself IUD removal.

But my husband is a far too involved partner to make that choice without him. Our kids are 10 and 12 now. I’m 41. I think, still, sometimes about how much I would have loved to have more children. “A gaggle,” I used to say to my husband; they’d be their own organism. He’s the oldest of three, and I’m the second of four. We both know what that gaggle feels like, the way that, once the parents are outnumbered, the kids possess a different sort of power. The pressure shifts, and alliances and tensions shift with it. We know how it’s both easier and more difficult to harbor secrets; shared bedrooms and bathrooms, the backseats of cars. So many overlapping limbs on late night drives that you could sometimes forget who’s whose.

My mom had a van with a third row because we were so many. There’s shit you can get away with in that last row that you can’t get away with in the front. It’s fun and terrifying, the way the older gets, so quickly, so much responsibility. The way the parents have no choice but cede some of the work to the older kids. A friend of mine, right after they found out they were pregnant with their fourth kid: “Once you switch from man-to-man, all bets are off.”

I have not always been close with my three siblings, but there is not anyone on Earth who understands the shape and texture, the weight and strangeness of one’s formative years like the person you clawed your way through them with.

My older sister used to hit me with a paddle brush on the drive to high school. We both now love this story. She was angry at me because she was 16 and I was 14, and really, what else could she be. She was struggling in all sorts of ways and had we been more grownup, maybe we could have helped each other, but as it was, she got some release before her day started. The brush was plastic. I was fine. I learned how not to piss her off, and once she found out I’d told other kids on the track team about it, I was able to shame her into doing it much less. We learned, in other words, plenty about how to be with other people, how to love and care but also to survive when love and care weren’t as immediately available to us.

I have not always been close with my three siblings, but there is not anyone on Earth who understands the shape and texture, the weight and strangeness of one’s formative years like the person you clawed your way through them with.

Of course, what I want my kids to have is not just siblings. Of course, no matter how many siblings one has, as one grows, there’s no guarantee they’ll be there to hold your hand, to collude with when the hard sh*t comes, to show up. For years, I hardly spoke to my siblings. The other day, I called my sister on my drive home from work. New Jersey to Brooklyn, my drive is an hour and a half. We talked the whole time and then, after I found parking, I sat in the car another half an hour so we could talk more. It was thrilling. My big sister. What was most exciting to me was that we finally got to also talk like we were friends.

Recently, in our little house in Brooklyn, we’ve started having large groups of people over once a month, kids encouraged. The children all go upstairs to our kids’ room, or our room, and tear it to shreds. The grownups seldom check on them. Our older daughter has set up a station in her room for making zines, and often, after a few hours, you can no longer make out the floor. Our bathroom doorknob has been broken for a long time, and there’s only the one bathroom. A couple months ago, (we decided finally to fix it after) grownups kept getting locked in, and the kids decided, depending on who the grownup was and how much they liked them, how long they’d make them wait before they let them out. Sometimes, on these weekends I get to hold a baby for an hour or two, to experience that quick hit of the physicality, all that need and constancy, but also the pleasure of knowing the mom who the baby belongs to gets a rest. After, our younger kid, who can be controlling and particular, has to suck it up when they see what a mess one of the toddlers has made of their room.

What I want for my kids, in other words, is community; their own version of that sibling gaggle. A world of groups separate from adults, and all the ways it is both more and less high stakes, all the ways it forces you to stretch and reconsider to whom and why you owe your care and attention. The ways it reminds you other people’s attention isn’t always guaranteed. I want them to know the pleasure of being the older one, sometimes, of telling someone what to do, of having someone who is not your parent, not an adult, serve as your guide; the reality that sometimes you have to put up with someone, even when you do not like them, that outside of school or any other sanctioned way of being, you have to be flexible, amenable; that sometimes the people you’re with won’t be and aren’t. What I want is for my kids to have a solid, rich and layered sense of other people. People who, if they don’t always necessarily like them, still understand that they have to try.

Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novels Hold Still, Want, and Flight. Her newest book, The Float Test, is out April 6th. You can preorder signed copies here.