When I decided to get pregnant with a third child (yes, I not we, decided) I thought I was going to stand out in a crowd with my big brood. At first people were shocked by three. Particularly my friends and family - I think my mother said something like, "Why?" But it wasn't long that I was the one getting all the notice and sympathy for having so much hard work upon me 24/7. No, soon everyone seemed to be expecting a third. Perhaps I was ahead of the crowd, I felt the trend coming maybe? I hate being like everyone else. It bugged me that our family was no longer out of the ordinary for middle-class northern Californians. There was something scintillating about the idea of breaking the long standing sanity of a two child household. Wasn't it feminism, education, rational behavior, population awareness, modern psychology, all those forms of elevated consciousness that made us consciously reduce our family sizes? We left behind the days of religious oppression, of permitting men to just get us pregnant, of thinking that more babies would fix us, fix the marriage. Now we had a neat package; two babies - either crammed together to bundle the costs and reduce the time away from a career or conversely spaced way apart to allow for more individual attention to each child as well as to spread the economic burden out - and a career, or perhaps a series of careers. We had balanced work and motherhood - we hired nannies, or started a co-op. We made huge portions of food every Sunday and froze it for the week so we could have at least 4 sit down meals together, as a family, because we all know, families who eat together do everything better. And out husbands were on board too weren't they? They did an equal portion of housework - right down the middle, 50-50. One person shops, the other cooks, one does the laundry, the other the vacuuming.
I am not that person. I like being different than what I perceive is the norm because I never can manage to live up to it anyway. First of all, I hated leaving my kids at day care or with a nanny. I couldn't stand the idea of someone else spending all that time with my still nursing baby. They were my kids and I wanted to be with them. I tried bringing my second child to work with me for a year and it was impossible. I was literally torn in two directions all day and I wasn't the only one who noticed the fraying of my nerves. Even my co-workers felt ignored. Also, my husband's job is extremely physical and he was simply unwilling to do much of anything when he came home from work. At first this deeply upset me, and all my female friends and my mother. I repeated verbatim their words of disgust right to my husband, in fights of course (you can imagine how effective this was) to no avail. Sometimes he would succumb a little bit and muster the strength to wash the dishes or make dinner (twice) but these new deals were very short lived. Eventually a marriage counselor told us to get a house cleaner. That was fabulous - but the guilt! Sometimes I would just get down with her and clean too - I felt terribly lazy about it (although the pleasure of a clean and effortless house was more than the remorse at having blown the work off myself so we had the house cleaned every week for many years.) My husband insisted it was saving our marriage.
Having a third child actually made it easy to do what I had been raised to never consider but was clearly my hearts desire (at least while my kids were young) which was to be a stay-at-home mother. It really wasn't realistic to think I could work and raise 3 children with little assistance from my husband (beyond making the bulk of the money of course). This is not to say he wasn't emotionally there for the kids or that he didn't spend time or energy on them. He did and he does. He just wasn't doing the grunge work - grocery shopping, cooking, lunches, cleaning, laundry, making beds, doctors visits, dressing, shopping for clothes, shoes etc. So I quit work and while I was at it, a few years later, had a fourth baby.
Yet again I was shocking! No one had four except the very wealthy (this was now becoming popular - a sign that you had so much disposable income that you could actually afford to raise four children all with utterly privileged lives.) I still was enjoying being so cutting edge and yet I also felt the real burden of what I had done. I realized too late, no one would ever invite us to dinner again. No one would ever want us to rent their vacation home or to borrow anything, ever. We really couldn't go to restaurants that weren't at least 80 decibels already and besides, even burritos ran us $60 now. There was not a single person who wanted to babysit for us (at least not for all four kids) accept my mother-in-law, bless her heart, but I couldn't possibly ask her more than once in a blue moon. Besides, I had this idea that each of my kids deserved the kind of attention that my first received for the first 4.7 years of her charmed and sibling free life. So I ran myself ragged trying to be all things to all my kids all the time.
I have had some real regret about having so many kids. I have certainly also felt pride that we have such an unusual, albeit, loud family. I have felt the full range of conflicting emotions - both trapped and surrounded by intense love, simultaneously over
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