Big families look really loony to me. I have caught myself thinking, “Holy cow, how does she DO it?” when I see a young mom surrounded by little kids on all sides, all of them bopping up and down and squawking and demanding attention. Sometimes I stop and discreetly do a head count of all the little heads that belong together, and I have a little revelation. Five, six, seven ….
… Oh. I had even more kids than that.
But it does look like a lot, from the outside. It is a lot. ANY amount of kids is a lot! One kid is a lot! But I had 10, after all. No wonder people were always staring at us. I get it now. Some of my kids have moved out, and none of them are really little, and while I’m not an empty nester yet, I’m out of the woods enough that I can see it from the other side. I see how we looked to other people when we were really in the thick of it: Beautiful, but undeniably loony.
Part of the reason for this is that, from the outside, a big family looks just like that: a big family. A unit. If you know a few big families only by sight, and not personally, you probably think of them as “the one with all the loud, redheaded kids” or “the one where they all look like farmers.” More than one person has told us we’re “that family with all the hair,” which I fully recognize is not the worst way we could be identified.
The point is, when there are a lot of kids in a family, it’s kind of a blur from the outside. Outsiders see that everyone in the family kind of resembles each other, and they’re sort of milling around the parents, and maybe you can recognize the oldest and the current baby, but in the middle — who knows? They’re just part of the bunch.
But believe me when I say that this is not how the parents see it, not unless something has gone very wrong in the family. Sometimes the wrong name comes out of my mouth when I’m calling a child, but this is just the general confusion of my brain, and it doesn’t mean I don’t know who they are. They are all unambiguously themselves and have been since day one.
I, like every decent mother of a large family that I know, take my children’s individuality extremely seriously, and they don’t seem like an undifferentiated mass to me, and they never have. They don’t even really look alike to me, except in little fleeting flashes here and there. I made them all individually, one at a time, and even when they were born very close together and raised under more or less the same circumstances, they have all always been so very different and distinct from each other. It has always been startling and bizarre to realize that, to people outside the family, we are just some kind of indeterminate welter of humanity, just a sort of Fisher borg.
The domestic church
We do have to treat our large family as a unit in some ways, buying large amounts of food and giant vehicles and sharing clothing and making plans based on the reality that parents cannot bilocate, and simply cannot accommodate every possible thing 10 individual children, no matter how cherished, would like to do. But in other ways, we tried (with varying success) to think of them as, and to convey to them that they are, distinct, and distinctly important; unique, and uniquely valuable.
Well, there is a reason we refer to the family as “the domestic church”… Read the rest of my latest column for Our Sunday Visitor.
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Image: Bianca degli Utili Maselli, holding a dog and surrounded by six of her children (c. 1565–1614) Wikimedia Commons (public domain)
Now that our baby is in high school and we have several kids completely out on their own, I look back on all my years of mothering with some fascination. Given the exact same conditions and circumstances, I could best be described as an entirely different person: from cheerleader, to nudge, to field marshal. Each of my kids experienced me so differently.
For instance, our parish school does an 8th grade science fair and it’s a really big deal. Every phase is closely monitored by the teacher – from thesis statement, to experiment, to conclusion and final presentation. Step one is due on a Monday morning. Sunday afternoon was going to look very different depending upon the child. If it was one of my Type A kids, if I did anything, I might have given an opinion on which of their five possible experiments would be most likely to win a prize. Other kids would’ve needed a gentle nudge to engage in the schoolwork, “How’s that thesis statement coming?” And still another kid would have needed a somewhat loud and forceful “Absolutely NO VIDEO GAMES until that thesis statement is done.” Just giving each child what he needed at the time. I guess God is that way too.
p.s. I want to echo what GiannaT said. I’ve been worried about you. Praying.
I think God’s been trying to pound this specific idea into my brain lately. It’s helpful to see it laid out, thank you.
In other news…happy to see you posting. With all the adventures you’ve been having with your health lately, I got a little worried about you when you didn’t post Friday.