On Family-having

  

  I came across a pretty great post over at the "In Honor of Design" blog.  Anna answered the question "Is having 5 kids hard?"  She give a really balanced response, honestly admitting to the mere physical logistics and limitations of being a mother of many, and speaking to the joy and the gift that is a big family.

One sentence stood out to me in particular, and I'm just going to plunk it down here for you. She said:

"Maybe we can even start changing the language to more positive and respectful dialogue, because we never know the road that someone else has traveled, and the challenges they have faced along that road."
                                                                --In Honor of Design  (read the rest here)


I was so thankful for the inspiration of these words!

Can I share a few thoughts?

For years I had a baby just about every 20 months.  It was my body's natural rhythm of fertility, and while my husband and I always put thought and prayer into the family we were growing, we were mostly just happy to be open to God's plan.  For us, there wasn't too much stress or strain involved with being open.  We had stresses and strains, but it wasn't really the kids, for us, that caused it.  They were our joy.

So, for well over a decade, I would sit around trying to come up with new, positive, and quippy ways to respond to strangers' comments on the number of children I had.

Then I began to run into people who couldn't have children.  There were those who were unmarried and desperately longed for the vocation I had.  There were those who were infertile.  There were even those who had walked a very long and very painful path of battling their way through fertility centers while trying to maintain the teachings of the Church (i.e. no IVF).

My quippy jokes about my own infertility were no longer funny.  I no longer took fertility for granted.

Then, after baby number 9, I had my own health crisis.  While I had needed to work for "spacing" in the past, I was at a point that that "spacing" was looking like it might need to be for an indefinite time.  And for me, that was not a happy prospect.

I lived in dread of someone asking if I "was done".

It happened, more than once.  I sort of laughed and said I was getting old. Or just said "you never know".  The people who asked weren't trying to be hurtful.  They just couldn't have known.

Now I am at a slightly different place in my journey.  I feel that a new chapter has begun as some of my health issues are resolving.  That's why I can even write this.  Before it would have been impossibly painful.

But in light of the wisdom I gained though the pain I have seen others carry, and the path I too had to walk, I was so happy to see the subject addressed as it was on Anna's IHOD blog.

"Maybe we can even start changing the language to more positive and respectful dialogue, because we never know the road that someone else has traveled, and the challenges they have faced along that road."

I wish this could be read by every sales clerk, hair dresser and passer-by who feels it is appropriate to question any mother's family size, whether with snide remarks or rude questions. Remember that that Mama with 1-year-old twins and a baby on the way might have gone through years of heartache before being blessed with fertility.  You probably don't have to ask her if she "knows where they came from?"

She knows.

They are from heaven.

And if a middle aged mom with a cart-load of kids looks like a washed up, haggard mess?  She probably doesn't need to be troubled by you about those children.  She's doing her best, and I promise you, there are days ahead for her too.  She'll go home and feed those children, and tuck them in bed for a few more years.  And then they will grow, and she will get more sleep.  And decades later?  She's going to have a cup overflowing with abundant life.  

Let's have the humility and simple good manners to know that other peoples' private lives are not ours to question or comment on.  Let us encourage and never joke about something so precious as the gift of life.  Let us keep that dialogue "more positive and respectful", as Anna said.  For truly, "we never know the road that someone else has traveled, and the challenges they have faced along that road."