A friend sent me the link to this article. I guess it hit me and I felt strongly enough about it to write the author an email back about it. Below is my reply:
Pamela,
I enjoyed your article in the Washington Post.
I am the mother of 6 children. I can’t imagine life without any one of them. They each bring something different to our family. When we started our family years ago, I never dreamed or imagined I’d have 6 children! I knew I didn’t want a ‘middle’ child and I wanted more than two, so I guess that led us to at least four. I grew up in a family of 5 children, which as a young mother did seem like a lot, but now with 6 of our own, we have a good life, albeit crazy at times. People often ask “How do you do it?”, in shock when they hear I have 6 children. I say, “one at a time!” I have to admit I sort of feel the same sense of shock and awe at moms of multiples! However you manage to “do it” one day at a time.
My children don’t attend all the sports or social lessons, and events that some kids do... we don’t shop at the most expensive stores in town, but they are well clothed and well fed, and we hope they know we love each and every one of them. We do not plan to spend a fortune paying for their college careers, because I think the people that I have known who had to work for it, seemed to appreciate it that much more because they had to invest more of themselves in it to make it happen. I hope this holds true for my children as well.
I will tell you that the statement about the mom who “already had one boy and one girl” hit home with me! I myself had girl after girl after girl... until the end. But it was very annoying to me with each pregnancy or birth that produced ‘yet another girl’ that somehow, that fact ‘made it acceptable’ to others, to try again. As if it would therefore have been unthinkable for me to have wanted another baby, - be it boy or girl – just because we felt like we wanted them! It was as if, if we’d had a boy somewhere in the mix, that it would not have been o.k. at all for us to continue wanting and trying for another baby. That really bothered me a lot over the years. Now that we did happen to have a boy at the end - #6 – people still assume we kept trying “until we got that boy”. For me, we ‘kept trying’ until our family felt complete.
We did not have 6 children to try and prove anything to anyone, and it certainly isn’t because of financial prosperity, and to show off. Our children bemoan the fact at times that many of their friends, live in fancier houses than we do or have more expensive clothes or ‘toys’ than we do, and it is ‘because’ we have so many kids! I think on the other hand they have it pretty darn good, and just don’t even know how much they’ve been given, and hope some day they will learn to appreciate all that they had growing up. I hope that they grow up to be good people, and to have good relationships with each other. I hope that my husband I get the opportunity to watch as they grow up, get married and have families of their own, and to try to encourage fun, loving relationships between all the little cousins! Won’t that be fun! To have a posterity of ‘good’ productive people, that certainly seems like a good reason to have had each of these little people that bless my life daily.
Best of luck with your baby #3! Enjoy the time you have with them, and don’t worry about what others think!
I am the mother of 6 children. I can’t imagine life without any one of them. They each bring something different to our family. When we started our family years ago, I never dreamed or imagined I’d have 6 children! I knew I didn’t want a ‘middle’ child and I wanted more than two, so I guess that led us to at least four. I grew up in a family of 5 children, which as a young mother did seem like a lot, but now with 6 of our own, we have a good life, albeit crazy at times. People often ask “How do you do it?”, in shock when they hear I have 6 children. I say, “one at a time!” I have to admit I sort of feel the same sense of shock and awe at moms of multiples! However you manage to “do it” one day at a time.
My children don’t attend all the sports or social lessons, and events that some kids do... we don’t shop at the most expensive stores in town, but they are well clothed and well fed, and we hope they know we love each and every one of them. We do not plan to spend a fortune paying for their college careers, because I think the people that I have known who had to work for it, seemed to appreciate it that much more because they had to invest more of themselves in it to make it happen. I hope this holds true for my children as well.
I will tell you that the statement about the mom who “already had one boy and one girl” hit home with me! I myself had girl after girl after girl... until the end. But it was very annoying to me with each pregnancy or birth that produced ‘yet another girl’ that somehow, that fact ‘made it acceptable’ to others, to try again. As if it would therefore have been unthinkable for me to have wanted another baby, - be it boy or girl – just because we felt like we wanted them! It was as if, if we’d had a boy somewhere in the mix, that it would not have been o.k. at all for us to continue wanting and trying for another baby. That really bothered me a lot over the years. Now that we did happen to have a boy at the end - #6 – people still assume we kept trying “until we got that boy”. For me, we ‘kept trying’ until our family felt complete.
We did not have 6 children to try and prove anything to anyone, and it certainly isn’t because of financial prosperity, and to show off. Our children bemoan the fact at times that many of their friends, live in fancier houses than we do or have more expensive clothes or ‘toys’ than we do, and it is ‘because’ we have so many kids! I think on the other hand they have it pretty darn good, and just don’t even know how much they’ve been given, and hope some day they will learn to appreciate all that they had growing up. I hope that they grow up to be good people, and to have good relationships with each other. I hope that my husband I get the opportunity to watch as they grow up, get married and have families of their own, and to try to encourage fun, loving relationships between all the little cousins! Won’t that be fun! To have a posterity of ‘good’ productive people, that certainly seems like a good reason to have had each of these little people that bless my life daily.
Best of luck with your baby #3! Enjoy the time you have with them, and don’t worry about what others think!
