A Responsible Number of Children
A Pregnancy Announcement
Good news! I am having my sixth baby at the end of September.
This post doubles as a gender reveal. I could have done this much, much earlier because apparently the emerging norm is to find out the gender of your baby via blood test at week six (I don’t actually know when you can do this, I just know that it’s early). We’re old fashioned and waited for the 19-week anatomy scan. So I’m going to make you wait (or scroll to the bottom), too. Someday, one of my grown daughters is going to ask me, “You mean, you didn’t even know the baby’s gender from the at-home test? You just waited until you could see everything on an ultrasound? That’s crazy.”
Anyway, we are on baby number six over here, due at the end of September, roughly three months before our tenth anniversary. I feel great, thanks for asking—this is my favorite trimester. I no longer feel like I’m on a boat and I do not yet feel like I am a boat.
We are so excited. The children are so excited. When we told them in March, there was more than one combat roll thrown in response. But it’s worth mentioning that near the end of January, the emotional energy reserve in the house was about here:
And that was before I realized I needed to take a pregnancy test.
I’ll have my sixth baby before my oldest child has his ninth birthday. We could be called a lot of things for this—“efficient” comes to mind. “Blessed,” is the most popular predicate adjective from friends and strangers alike.
“Busy!”
… irresponsible.
No one is using the i-word to my face. That would be rude. The place that I get called “irresponsible” the most is inside of my own head (also rude). But the position that having a lot of children is a less-than-responsible choice is kind of in the water, and I’m not just talking about the “You’re overpopulating the earth” people and the “Those babies never asked to be born” people or their counterparts, the “Why would you have your own children when there are already so many who need homes?” people.
We read Milan and Kay Yerkovich’s popular Christian book on marriage, How We Love, when our third was a baby. We even had workbooks. In the workbook content on Chapter 3, “Imprints in Intimacy from Our First Lessons on Love,” some “Extraordinary Challenges” that can disrupt parent-child bonding and otherwise adversely affect children are listed, not limited to but including: “A sibling mistreated me,” “One of my parents died when I was growing up,” “My parent was ill,” “My parents were busy all the time,” and “There were more than five kids in my family when I was growing up.”
This struck me at the time as odd. It was like playing a “one of these things is not like the others” game on Sesame Street. I have no doubt that my children will face challenges, some that could be classified as “extraordinary,” some of which will be directly linked to the fact that there are more of them than in the typical American family. However, I think that the challenges they will face in the future (and are facing now) are simply different in kind than the ones they would face if I had stopped at three children and then taken on an 80-hour workweek and then died (presumably of exhaustion).
Pictured below is a page from the workbook. Just in case you can’t see it, it says under “There were more than five kids in my family when I was growing up”…
In very large families, parents are often consumed with meeting their children’s basic needs. Consequently, Mom and Dad may be overwhelmed by the amount of work and therefore have little time to notice or attend to each child’s emotional needs.
Let the record show that I have never felt more like that than I did after the birth of my oldest. Just one baby. That can knock you into the stratosphere, the question of responsibility aside.
Perhaps I’m not being fair. The purpose of the Yerkovichs’ book (and/or workbook) is not to outline the ideal family size (though it is worth noting that they had four children). Their thesis was that we love the way we’ve been loved—exploring families of origin can shed a lot of light on the current state of a marriage. But a numerical stance was taken (albeit an offhand one): functional family < six children. And this type of commentary is not limited to any one workbook or conversation. Peppered throughout the discourse on marriage and parenting are these types of not-so-subtle warnings about having “too many kids,” whether that means three or four or five or more.
The threshold for a “big family” seems to be right at five or six children, depending on who you ask. Whether or not having this many children is responsible, it is objectively rare. Only five percent of American women have five or more children. Catherine Ruth Pakaluk’s book, Hannah’s Children, offers an in-depth exploration of this type of mother. Pakaluk is an economist who conducted 55 qualitative interviews with women who were: American born, college-educated, and had at least five children. The purpose of Hannah’s Children is not to outline the ideal family size, either (though it is worth noting that Pakaluk has eight children). Her purpose was to find out why, in a developed country with a total fertility rate of 1.7 births per woman, some women “defy the birth dearth.”
A friend recommended this book with, “Maybe this could be your pep talk for having a sixth baby.”1 It’s the most personally important book I’ve read (or listened to on audio, in this case) in the last five years, excluding the Gospels and He Leadeth Me. It’s a book about economics and teleology—it helped me explore the “why” of having a big family. And whether I was wanting to pull the car over so I could give a proper standing ovation (Chapter 17) or crying so hard in the carpool line I had to switch to Pippi Longstocking (Chapter 20), it was a lot like having a group of compassionate women surrounding me, telling me, “This is going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. And so are your kids.”
Hannah’s Children uses the concept of “tradeoffs” to talk about large family life, which I found incredibly helpful. There are costs, both for us and for our kids. Here’s a short list:
The Kids:
They don’t get their own rooms or much personal space
They don’t participate in nearly as many extracurriculars as their friends
They don’t get as much one-on-one attention from a parent as a child in a “normal-sized family”
We will not have as many monetary resources to dedicate to each individual child’s future
They will, sooner rather than later, be driving around in an enormous car that some friends will call “weird.”
What do they gain in the trade? More of… each other. That’s it. They do seem to like it, though. They also get plentiful opportunities to share and be assertive and resolve conflict. AND the dual luxuries of downtime and boredom. Far be it from me to say that there is only one right family size—that’s ridiculous. All I’m saying is that the tradeoffs of big family life carry, at the very least, the possibility of upsides.
Us:
Advanced degrees in our twenties (we’re not saying never, but it certainly didn’t happen then. Also, I know people who had a boatload of babies in their twenties and managed to get advanced degrees anyway… this tradeoff is personal to us and to our past. I do think that the most natural step for each of us, had we not chosen to marry each other, would have been grad school).
A more conventional career for me than “part-time freelance writer”
Travel (same deal as the degrees, I do know people who have managed this; we have decided to stay as close to our house as humanly possible).
A tidier house. We went back and forth on this one, because I maintain that having so many kids in such a short time has taught me skills and strategies I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise. But, it’s true, if no one was throwing oatmeal on the floor anymore (like it was his JOB), the kitchen would be easier to clean.
Takeout. Oh, the mountains of Chipotle I have forgone for this lifestyle.
What did we gain in the trade? Well… more kids. The only thing that would surprise 20-year-old Meredith more than the fact that she’d have at least six kids is that she would like it. Seriously, there are times when I’m putzing around in the kitchen and my husband and sons are working on some project at the counter and the big sister is reading to the little sister and I’m so happy I’m probably shining. It’s worth noting that the toddler is occupied during these “shining” times, either napping or peacefully filling an empty Nalgene with dry spaghetti. As Pakaluk observes in Chapter 6, mothers of many acknowledged that “They would give up something of themselves, but their children would give it back to them with interest.”
I have found this to be true.
Somehow, this is working. We have seen cars and houses and jobs and bags of clothes simply appear, exactly when needed. And I don’t know that we would have had the occasion to pray for these things the way that we did unless we had had “too many kids.”
Pakaluk notes that many parents wish that they had had just one more baby, but no one wishes for “just one fewer” child.2 I mean, who regrets a child? The lady casually dropping, “Well, it would have been better not to have ever had Jeff in the first place,” in conversation is also plotting to make a fur cape out of puppy pelts.
It's a very different thing to decide to stop having children than it would be to regret existing children. Humans regret possibilities—jobs we didn’t have, moves we never made, children we never had. Once the move is made from “possibility” to “person,” though, “regret” means something different. Maybe that’s the point. I do not believe that I’ll regret any of my children. I doubt my own abilities, sure. All the time. But it’s interesting to shift my focus to what we’ve gained from our trade-offs as possibility has become person, now for the sixth time.
There’s this Ed Sheeran song called “Nancy Mulligan,” which tells the love story of his grandparents. The Wellermen’s cover of the song wound up on our Sea Shanty Spotify playlist (Jonny wants everyone to know that the cover is better than the original, so there you are). Sheeran’s grandparents fell in love in their twenties, got married even though their parents didn’t approve (Protestant/Catholic divide), and went on to have eight children (five sons, three daughters), more than twenty grandkids, and 60+ years together.3
I should make it clear that none of our parents disapproved of our marriage and have never made derogatory comments about how many children we have. They are the best grandparents on earth.
Even so, as the song about the Sheerans’ love story played over the minivan speakers for the umpteenth time, the thought floated into my mind… You actually have a shot at that. Well, Jonny has informed me that he simply will not live past eighty. He’ll just die reading one winter evening, and that will be that. So not quite sixty years, but close. We have a shot at the kind of story and the kind of family that’s becoming rarer by the decade. It was—and is, and will be—an act of faith, one I don’t think I’ll regret.
and now…
A GENDER REVEAL
My seven-year-old daughter really, really wanted a baby sister.
How much? SO. MUCH.
This is an important thing to know up front.
Here’s how the roster stands right now: Boy, girl, girl, boy, boy. The weekend before my ultrasound, I had each child dye one white carnation—blue if they thought the baby was a boy, red if they thought the baby was a girl. All you do is put the food coloring into the water, and the dye seeps up into the carnations via capillary action. The result is difficult to see below, but pastel blue and extremely faint pink were the results. The boys both voted “boy,” and the girls both voted “girl.” The toddler was excluded from using food dye or guessing. I told them I’d dye the water in a larger vase with a whole bunch of white carnations to reveal whether the baby was a boy (blue dye) or a girl (red dye).
Sometimes, being a parent means drastically disappointing the people you love the most.
Of course… there are other times…
… when it doesn’t.
These are PINK CARNATIONS!
My daughter gave me one of her “I knew it all along” smirks.
I shouldn’t say that this didn’t mean any disappointment, though, my three-year-old son did shed a few tears and spent his evening frowning at the vase. We are back to even-stevens over here at Hinds house, three sons, three daughters, and yes, I am as surprised as you are!
ON THE CALENDAR
Since I’ve already gone way beyond my word count (and it’s only 10:19 p.m.), all I’m going to do is share one of the verses from tomorrow’s Gospel: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” (John 14:27)
Happiest of Easter seasons to YOU, faithful reader who has made it this far.
This essay, “You Won’t Regret Another Baby” by
, is lovely (and caring and heartfelt)One more Hannah’s Children point: if Sheeran’s grandparents really and truly “don’t care about religion” like the song says, then the choice to have eight children was an outlier, for sure. Yes, they still wanted to get married even though one of them was Protestant and one of them was Catholic, but I would be willing to bet that faith still mattered to them. Fun fact: my son sings the words “Don’t give up religion” over that line, not because he’s trying to scrub the song, but because that’s what he actually thinks they are singing... I’m not going to correct him anytime soon.
As an only child, who has looked with envy at larger families, as long as it is a well adjusted large family. Everyone has a built in social network, it’s easier to find work, to find spouses, to find free furniture, to find a safe place to crash if life takes a downturn. It’s easier to find roommates. And a number of young professionals I know from larger families have bought starter houses with siblings. There are always people to help move.
A lot of people I know from large families, think that having more money would have made their childhood better, but they are usually totally oblivious to all the social capital they have, that I see as an only child.
Congratulations!!
We're at three. I wanted at least five, and am gobsmacked that we have the relatively small number of kids we do at this stage (ten years of marriage...I'm one of nine, my mom had five or six by this point!).
Life never seems to throw what you'd actually expect at you. Go figure.