How to Handle Having a Big Family

"How do people do it?" a friend of mine once asked.

"How do they do what?" I inquired.

"
How do they stay sane when they have lots of kids?"

Good question.  I'd asked myself that same thing on more than one occasion.  I'd only been married eight years and had five children. Sometimes I wondered what sane even was.

"Well," I tried to come up with an answer. "My mom and my aunts all have big families, and they seem to handle it pretty well.  In fact, I love watching them on Sunday evenings.  They sit around and laugh and giggle for hours, and they seem pretty sane." 

"How many kids do they have?" my friend asked. 

"They each have six," I told her.

"That crazy!" she exclaimed.

Yeah, probably. 

"When you have just one child," I suggested, "it seems pretty hard, because everything is new and you're not used to having someone else to take care of.  Then when you have two kids it's pretty much the same, only twice as many mouths to feed, tears to dry, and buckles to fasten when you get in the car."

With three children you can't carry everybody anymore.  Either someone has walk or be in a stroller.  For me, I still had only two diapers to change because Linnea was potty trained before Russell was born, but there were still more tears to dry, more mouths to feed, and more clothes to wash.

"But four was the hardest.  Somehow it was harder to keep track of everybody, and they were never all happy at the same time.  The worst part was giving up the idea of ever having them all down for naps at the same time.  The only personal time I got was after everyone was in bed.  I can't tell you how many nights I stayed up till midnight, cleaning the house and mopping the floors, just so it could be clean for a couple of hours until the kids got up next morning."

"That's exactly how I feel," my friend moaned with despair.  "I clean and clean, but as soon as I finish one room and move on to the next the kids mess up the room I just cleaned.  Why bother doing the dishes or the laundry?  The second it's done I have to start all over again."

I laughed, not because it was funny, but because I totally understood where she was coming from.  "Five kids, somehow, is easier," I told her encouragingly.  "Or at least, it isn't harder.  It's really not that much more cooking or cleaning.  And I finally figured out my mom's secret.  After five kids, something just snaps up there in your brain, so you go around giggling all the time."

My friend laughed, but I really did mean it.  "My sister-in-law has another theory," I told her.  "She says that each time a woman is pregnant part of the oxygen she needs has to go to the baby, so her brain doesn't get as much, causing a little brain damage.  She calls it 'maternal dementia'.

That really did make my friend laugh.  "But I think there's another reason mom and my aunts always seem happy," I told her.  "I heard a lecture once by a famous family psychologist who said to be healthy a woman needs to talk. The problem is, men don't.  He said that back in the old days women didn't have as much depression because they spent more time with other women, talking.  In those days families usually lived close together, so they saw each other nearly every day.  They also spent lots of time with other women, having quilting and sewing bees and stuff.  His theory was that women of today suffer more anxiety, depression, and other psychological problems because they don't have a chance to talk to each other like they used to.  Maybe mom and her sisters handle things better because every single Sunday they get together and sit around laughing and giggling and talking."