Yes, I Have Six Kids

The other day I had my 36,429th conversation with someone that went like this:

“Wow, you have six kids? That’s a lot of kids.” 

“Yep. It is.”

“Wow, it must be so hard.” 

“Well, sure it’s hard. But they’re worth it.” 

Then I point to my license plate that says ‘Think Big’.

I have plenty of friends that have 1, 2 or 3 kids that believe to the depth of their soul that that is all they could handle. Family size is incredibly personal. But as individuals make decisions about this, they tap into the collective culture to form their decisions. Let my 36,429 conversations be a case study – the collective culture holds that having a lot of kids is unfathomable. My question is: why? Why when women can make any choice they want do we not include raising humans as one of our best options? 

And I think the answer is that our culture pits having children and being fulfilled against each other. Children keep you from success, money, pleasure, status, and lifestyle according to the culture.

Even though we live in an age that tells women they can do anything, become whoever they want to be, choosing to be a mother at all – let alone a mother to many – seems implicitly off the table if you want to succeed. If you really have the desire, fine have one, maybe two. But any more and you are directly robbing from your quality of life.

One of the biggest places I see this is among intellectuals, especially writers. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Magic Lesson’s podcast is one guest after another bemoaning the fact that for a woman to create art, she has to pull herself away from the family on an existential level and go to her inner life to produce great work. I call this going to the desk in my room while my kids are at preschool and working. Or like other working mothers, hiring a babysitter. It is how I freelance write, it is how I have written now two novels and one food memoir. Sure, I get taking a writing retreat or weekend occasionally, and while I love taking them it is just that, a retreat from daily life to focus on work. My kids don’t keep me from my work in writing, my kids enrich my life which in turn makes me a better writer. How could finding deep empathy for six humans (seven if we’re counting spouses), championing their strengths and advocating for their weaknesses not make me a better student of the human condition? And isn’t that where good writing starts? 

When I was a new mother, I read a collection of short stories about motherhood by Helen Simpson called Getting A Life that was hailed as an amazing work. I remember I was excited to read about this rich and hard experience I was immersed in. What I read started with a portrait of a mother of two young children through the eyes of an ambitious young girl on her way to an interview, who was walking by their house just as the young daughter had stuck something up her nose, while a baby who was “dark red as a crab apple” cried in the mother’s arms. The girl observed the mother’s ‘ragged cuticles, the graceless way her heels stuck out from the backs of her sandals like hunks of Parmesan, and the eyes which had dwindled to dull pinheads.” The portrait was sad and lonely and ugly, so unlike all of the beautiful mothers I had known throughout my life. When the mother sighed and said ‘this was the hardest year of her life’ the girl didn’t offer compassion, or female empowerment, or empathy, she just “started to sprint, fast and light”. The message was clear: having small children sucks your soul, and if you are full of dreams, you should run.

I stopped reading after the first story.

This didn’t speak to my experience at all. I had two young children and possibly felt on rough days that these were the hardest of my life, but that wasn’t the whole truth of it. It wasn’t the whole story. And the lack of humanity given to the mother, the young child, and the baby was glaring. The vignette left out so much nuance – the dimples on babies’ hands, the way they smell after a bath, the way their eyes light up when they’re happy – that sustains mothers on their hard days. It was such a superficial, distorted portrait. Like writing about teenagers as all pimples and smelly socks and leaving out what it is like to observe bourgeoning athletes, intellectuals, humorists. One write up of the book called it the ultimate contraceptive.

It doesn’t matter that the author had no children herself (she went on to write three more books about motherhood, go figure) or that the portrait was radically inaccurate (probably because she had no kids). There is no question that among the intellectual communities, children hold you back. One article writes that ‘militantly childless women passed it around to their friends that were thinking about having kids’. In such an environment, why wouldn’t young women be scared to have kids? Let alone have more than one or two. 

I know the strangers who see us or the acquaintances that learn that I have six kids have been living with a culture who proclaims this fear, who have been taught from reading their intellectual newspapers and magazines and literature that children equal the death knell to the interior, creative life. That they equal empty bank accounts and ‘eyes which had dwindled to dull pinheads’.

How do I explain to one of these incredulous strangers what it is like when your three-year-old son who has Down syndrome learns to plant kisses, and you watch their older siblings rush to line up for these kisses with the same enthusiasm they have on Christmas morning? That during the age when they should be self-involved and self-centered they will volunteer to play with their three-year old brothers? That during a pandemic, they will have each other, and it will be such a gift. Last time I checked, these things made my eyes sparkle, and filled my heart with stories to tell.

Yes, having a big family requires us to Think Big. But the fact that managing a large everything – kitchen, car, calendar, budget – seems SO HARD to people befuddles me. Women can be running large corporations or sales territories, mutual funds or medical schools, but managing children is seen as the hardest, dreariest task on the planet. 

Having a large family is hard, but meeting the challenges is exactly like meeting the challenges in every other hard endeavor. Time management, reaching out for growth and learning, talking with others to gain insights into problems, managing group dynamics, figuring out the most efficient ways to do routine tasks through streamlining and outsourcing. Most days I feel equipped to run a company because running my family feels kind of like I already do. 

Raising kids – any number of kids – is hard because their existence requires self-sacrifice from the parents. And if there is anything that our collective culture abhors it is self-sacrifice. They forget the other side of the self-sacrifice equation which is self-gift. This is where all the good stuff of life is to be found: joy, meaning, purpose, passion, commitment, loving and being loved, goodness, beauty, truth. Because to give self-gift for others always, always comes with your gift returned to you ten-fold.

And after listening to all this bad, all this fear, I have heard from so many women who are at the age of becoming grandmothers who have confided their disappointment to me that for some reason, their kids don’t want to have kids. I don’t think it is a surprise at all. The world has been shouting at them not too. 

For so many people, the goals of 1) avoiding suffering and 2) having control in their life end up creating even more suffering. And these are the people I want to encourage to think bigger. When you are open to the idea that a child is not the cause of suffering but joy, you are less afraid. You are open to so much love. Because that is what each child brings. The irony for women in our culture is that the things they are told will bring them fulfillment don’t actually fulfill them. And the things that do, like motherhood, they are told to fear.

Here is what I have found, 14.5 years in: having a big family is fun. It is the most interesting and amusing thing I could ever think of doing. Yes there are periods of white knuckling it, like stages with no sleep or a health crisis. But they pass and usher in periods of ‘my cup runneth over’. See the self-gift equation above. You get it back, ten-fold.