People ask me all the time if I planned to have a large family. Just last week, four people asked me this nicer version of their real question: Why do you have so many kids? It’s taken me a while to be able to answer this honestly. No, I didn’t plan on having a large family. The reason I have six children is, to put it simply, I wanted to. They came one at a time, and six times, we eagerly anticipated a new member of the family.
I didn’t particularly love children as a young woman. I babysat only reluctantly as a teen, preferring my own activities to trying to entertain children. I did plan on having a family eventually, like I planned on owning a house and taking two weeks vacation every year. No plan, though, could have prepared me for the experience of having my own child.
I was excited to be pregnant with my first baby. I had been married for three years–a respectable amount of time, one friend recently assured me–when I started to long for a baby. I started having dreams about babies, and thinking about what it would be like to be a mother. Suddenly, I saw mothers and babies everywhere, and I imagined having my own cooing, adorable bundle of joy.
As my pregnancy progressed, I felt like an alien being had taken over my body. My hormones were bringing chaos to my moods, my skin, my hair and my brain. My growing belly threw me off balance in every way. My clothes didn’t fit, and eventually I didn’t fit. Forgetting my new shape, I tried to squeeze by a grocery cart in checkout line in one embarrassing moment late in pregnancy. I was clumsy and forgetful, frighteningly emotional and hungry all the time.
I felt out of control and unprepared. I volunteered to work in a nursery, hoping to get an idea of how to hold and care for an infant. I was not a natural; I was stiff and afraid of hurting this little person and making him cry. The idea of doing this myself was terrifying. To push back the fear, I took classes on childbirth and nursing, read and re-read books on what to expect, what to buy and what to do. I could not really prepare, I know now. This was not merely a lifestyle or scheduling change. It was a transformation.
If someone had been able to make me understand–really understand–what I was going to have to do to birth this baby, I would have said it was impossible. I’m not that strong. There was no choice, though, and the result of my Herculean effort was a tiny, red infant, crying in my arms. I was overwhelmed. I was in love. How could this perfect little person have come from my body? This was a sense of accomplishment and amazement unlike any I’d known. I was witness to a miracle.
A mother doesn’t give life to a child. A mother is host to creation far above her control, an intimate observer, a captive witness. I began to see other mothers as fellow witnesses to the miracle, and children not as miniature adults, but as someone’s baby. This was wild, messy and mysterious, a connection to the world at a deep, basic level. I was dipping my toes into the surging, primal deep, peering into the unfathomable rhythms of creation, and it was intoxicating.
I dove in. One at a time, we were blessed with five more unique and amazing gifts of new life, and fell in love each time. I loved the whole process: the pregnancy, the birth, the babies, the community of other mothers and babies. As our family grew, I loved the dynamic of older and younger siblings, the playing, teaching, helping; the happy busyness. We had so much fun exploring, camping, creating and being together.
There were times, of course, when I was tired and overwhelmed, but my memory of the days when I was consumed with nursing and diapers and school and birthday parties has taken on a gauzy glow of sweetness and kinship that I think is not too far from the reality.
Sometimes I feel like I was greedy to want to prolong my stay in that stage of life longer than most women do. Sometimes, when I’m completely spent, emotionally, physically, or financially, I think I was crazy. Most of the time, I feel grateful.
I’m amazed by the love I give and receive, the incredible, gifted women and men who call me Mom, and the deep satisfaction I experience in motherhood. I could not have planned for this. My imagination would not have been big enough.
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