Why I Have a Billion Children

My sister, who is currently working on her fifth child, likes to tell people about my seven and then call me to talk about their reactions. Responses vary from incredulous to condemning. This article is for the curious. Those who call me “irresponsible” won’t hear or consider my reasons. They will scream about carbon footprints and I will counter with curiosity about who they think is going to fund their social security payments, but neither of us will be convinced nor uplifted. This article is not for them. It is, perhaps, most for those who knew me when I was younger and wonder how the girl slated by her high school class to “conquer a small nation,” instead decided to create one.

Why do I have a billion children?

Because of what I believe. 

I was surprised, when I became an adult, to realize that the doctrine of the preexistence was not common to all Christian faiths. I believe it is one of the fundamental reasons so many Mormons decide to have large families. We believe that we are eternal beings. We existed before we were spiritually created by our Father in Heaven. We existed with him as spiritual beings before we were physically created by our Earthly parents. In heaven, we made the choice to come to Earth as the next step in our eternal progression. We are here for a variety of reasons, all having to do with God’s plan for our salvation. When we have a child, his/her spirit is not created in order to fill a physical body. We believe it is the opposite. 

How does this result in a greater desire for children? Imagine your father, who you love and revere, came to you and said, “There is a child, a member of our family. He needs a home. After considering many other options, I want you to raise him. I will make sure you have what you need financially, emotionally and physically if you are willing.” Would you say no? This is a very real parallel to our perspective on the decision to have children. When I feel the stirring in my heart that begins the consideration of whether or not to have another child, I am much less concerned with questions of practicality. I am more concerned with discovering whether or not that feeling is from God.

Does that mean that we all have to have a billion children? Of course not. Our father is loving, nurturing and all knowing. He does not give to his children equally, but each according to their individual needs. The choice to have one, two or ten babies has to be between a husband, wife, and God. But my belief in parenthood as a divine calling is fundamental to my decision to have a large family. 

Because of my love for my husband. 

Before you ask, Yes. I have heard of birth control and, No. I am not talking about that kind of love. As a young woman, I heard about being “baby hungry” and thought it meant that babies are little and cute and you wanted one. I saw it as akin to wanting a kitten. I was wrong.

After I married my husband, I discovered that my initial desire for children had nothing to do with the children themselves. I wanted a child as a natural expression of my powerful love for my husband. This is hard to describe in words. I loved him. I loved being a family with him. I wanted to be a parent with him. I wish I could explain it better.  Certainly, I fall in love with him again as I watch him being a father. Each new child only compounds that love.

Because I believe it’s best for my children.

A few years ago, I was having breakfast with a friend and her two children. Before presenting her nine-year-old with a waffle, she carefully cut it into bite sized pieces. One of my kids noticed and said, “Mom, cut my waffle.” I laughed and laughed and laughed.  

I believe that every child is given to the parent that needs them and vice versa. I believe that there are successful families in all sizes. I believe that there are a million ways to be a good mom, but none to be a perfect one.  I believe my friend’s child needed her waffle cut. Mine did not. My kids are independent, hardworking and learn service from the time they are very small. My oldest was thirteen months old when his brother was born. At that age, he learned to bring me the wipes and find his brother’s binky. Now he has the great privilege of taking care of his younger brothers and sisters in addition to himself. 

I learned as a young mother that doing everything for my kids was much easier than teaching them to do it themselves. As we welcomed more children to our family, I learned the opposite.  Some people seem to think that children do not get the love and attention they need when there are more kids to split mom’s attention. My kids disagree. They know that mom’s love is boundless and only added upon by the love they get from each other. We live in a circus, but we always have fun. 

Because I love this life.

Yesterday, I was trying to get my house cleaned up for guests. It made me a bit distracted. My three year old colored the stairs I had just vacuumed with sidewalk chalk. My three littlest worked together to move the contents of the spice cupboard to the oven. I did not know this when I preheated it to make bread. I found two of my bathroom toilets clogged with an entire roll of toilet paper each. Those are just the major things, I won’t detail spilled cereal bowls or sticky fingerprints. After putting the babies to bed, I sat down to watch a movie with my husband, which was interrupted half a dozen times by my four year old who couldn’t sleep. When we finally stumbled, exhausted, downstairs to bed, we found all five of our children who don’t sleep in cribs passed out with their blankets on the floor of our room.  

And do you know what? I wouldn’t change it for the world. 

Motherhood is my masterpiece. It is my passion. It is the greatest joy that I could ever imagine. It saps my brain, exhausts my body, and denies me the things I once thought I loved. But I don’t think I’ve truly sacrificed a thing. Giving up something good for something better is not a sacrifice. I don’t care that my house isn’t clean. I don’t regret the lack of time for decorating or vacationing. I don’t miss my teenage body or the great things I was once sure I could do for the world. I believe there is nothing more important than what I’m doing. I am convinced that success is measured in happiness.   I couldn’t be more successful. 

I have a billion kids because they make me happy.

On Motherhood: Uplift. Encourage. Inspire.

There’s  a saying being passed around various social media. It’s always some permutation of this: “A woman who loses a husband is a widow. A child who loses a parent is an orphan. There is no word for a mother who loses a child because language is not sufficient to describe this kind of pain.” Is the loss of a child the most excruciating experience of this life? From my perspective, it certainly could be. I do not mean to diminish or question the agony that accompanies saying goodbye to such pure love. But, I don’t believe the pain has anything to do with the lack of a title afforded to those who are its victims. 

May I suggest   that the reason there is no word for a woman who loses a child is because our language is old, and, until very recently, such a woman was known simply as a mother. If there is a surprise here, it’s that there is no word for a woman who has never lost a child. In generations past, she was the anomaly. She was the outlier. She was the one who must be separated from the flock, not for her trial, but for the obvious grace she had been given from God. 

My sweet grandmother was the sixth of nine children, three boys and six girls. In her personal history she wrote of her overwhelming desire to never cause her parents hurt and worry. She felt they had suffered enough because their oldest four children, including all of their sons, never made it to adulthood. Later in her life, she would face her greatest trial when her first baby was born prematurely and only lived twenty-six hours.

I don’t pretend to understand the pain of losing a child. I have carried seven children in my body and I currently have seven children sleeping under my roof. Among my beloved miracles is a daughter who was born at the same period of gestation as my grandmother’s oldest. Instead of planning a funeral, I brought my lovely daughter home after only a week in the hospital. She’s a perfectly happy and healthy two-year-old. The only real difference in my experience and my grandmother’s was two generations of time. 

Advances in medical technology, standards of living, vaccinations, and sanitation have completely changed the world in only a few years. I can only imagine what the women of a few generations ago would say, if they could see their progeny. I imagine that they would cry tears of joy for the miraculous recoveries and the long lives of the children born to our generation. I can’t help but wonder, however, how they would feel about the way we approach parenting, now that we no longer need fear the loss of our precious little ones. 

And now we’re getting to the point of all this reflection. Grandma summed it up in a few simple words when she said, “On November 15, 1938, we had our first child, born at the LDS hospital in Salt Lake, but she was premature and only lived 26 hours.  We felt like we were really being tried, but we never lost our faith and took our problems as they came.  Here I want to express my gratitude to my dear parents for the love and help they gave us during this time and my gratitude also goes to Lewis and Eulalia Anderson for their concern for us in those early years of our marriage, and for the support and help that they gave us.” 

I look at those words, “love, support, help,” and my heart breaks as I consider the culture of competition, condemnation, and bitterness that so many of us have embraced. I have come to dislike the “mom blog” mentality more than I can describe. It seems like every time I turn around, there is another hot-button issue. Making your kids hug grandparents sets them up for being victims of molestation. Bottle feeding your kids means you don’t love them. Using disposable diapers causes allergies. Co-sleeping causes SIDS. Co-sleeping prevents SIDS. Sacrificing to pay for expensive, academic preschools is what selfless parents do. You should love your spouse more than your kids. You should put your kids’ needs before your spouse.  You should  (or should not) give your kids vitamin supplements. You have to buy organic foods. Homeschooling damages your child’s ability to socialize. Public schools are indoctrination mills. Teach your child to share.  A no-share policy teaches respect for other’s rights and eliminates the dangerous entitlement mentality. Starting solids earlier prevents/causes food allergies. Epidurals are for the weak and selfish. Make your beds every day. Real moms have dirty houses. Have a lot of kids. Space them out. Crying it out. Scheduling. Attachment. Independence. Home birth/water birth. Doctor/Doula/Midwife. And on and on and on.

Every time I turn around, someone is not only advocating their own expertise, but condemning the other perspective as “bad parenting.” I have been as guilty a perpetrator as any. I desperately love my children and want to raise them the best way possible. But, the older I get, the more convinced I am that the most dangerous thing I do as a parent is buying into the idea that there is a perfect way to raise children. In the end, these things matter so little. There are millions of ways to be a good mother, and none to be a perfect one. 

Being a mother is truly the greatest and hardest of life’s experiences. And we are truly the most privileged and blessed generation of mothers. But in my mind, I can see my grandmother, surrounded by her sisters in motherhood, supporting and loving each other through life’s most difficult trial. I can also see the women of my generation angrily typing their soap boxes into social media, sacrificing love and support in favor of fighting for what they consider to be advocating for the children. Except that I am convinced the children are more damaged by the battle than benefited by the advocacy. 

Motherhood is about love, compassion, and patience. Can’t we extend a little of that for the other women who share our joys and trials?  Isn't that what it truly means to have a mother's heart? We are all doing our very best. We all love our little ones so much. We truly need each other.

The problem with honesty

If movie, television and books are to be believed, honesty is the most important aspect of any relationship. I certainly thought it was when I got married. People ought to be honest with one another. In our more recent culture, that has been changed to brutally, cruelly honest. In our current estimation of virtue, it seems that we value truth over kindness, compassion and love. I, therefore, found it a bit of an adjustment to find myself in love with a man who didn’t like to share.

At the time, I was quite insecure. I didn’t think I was beautiful or thin enough to be what a man truly wanted and I was worried that soon after getting married, my husband would realize that he could have done better. I had observed the dynamic in several other couples. I knew that it was normal for a man to admit his wife’s faults or even talk about his attraction to other women in front of her. These things, after all, constitute honesty, which is to be valued over all. 

My husband was never honest with me, as I saw it. If we were watching a movie together and I pointed out how beautiful the actress was, he would scoff and make comments such as, “What are you talking about, she looks nothing like you.” I found it endearing, but also frustrating. I knew he was lying to me and that bothered me.

Fourteen years later, I have realized that my husband’s constant insistence that I was perfect, was the greatest gift anyone has ever given me. You see, what he really gave me was the gift of being unsure. He tells me that my rounded curves and extra padding make up, “the most beautiful body in the world.” He tells me I don’t need make up and my hair is gorgeous in a ponytail. He tells me I am as lovely as the day he met me and he adores me more now than then. He tells me every other woman pales in comparison and he will never be worthy of me. Is he truly so deluded? I DON’T KNOW. When I was young, I was certain he was lying out of love for me. But years and years of hearing something can leave you wondering whether or not it’s actually true.

The greatest gift my husband ever gave me was to make it so that I don’t know whether or not he is being honest. Because somewhere in my heart there’s a part of me that whispers, “Maybe he’s telling the truth.” Why is that uncertainly so important? Because the young woman I was at the beginning of this marriage had no idea it was possible to be loved like that. I do.

Miracles are Far from Rare

 

I pray for my children constantly. They are my whole world and I am desperately struggling to make the decisions that will set them up for happiness throughout life. But once in a while I find myself facing a problem that I simply have no idea how to solve and all the googling in the world doesn't seem to help. Yesterday, I found myself in such a situation. One of my kids is going through a trial and I had no clue how to make it better. Where the internet failed, I turned to my Heavenly Father. I poured my heart out to him and asked for help.

This morning I hauled myself out of bed and wandered out to the elliptical machine. My ipad was perched on top, where it has been for days. You see, that thing has a herculean battery. I use it to read as I exercise (clearly not very well) and if I leave it there, it will only lose a couple percentages a day in battery life. It was in the eighties yesterday. This morning, it was completely dead. I couldn't possibly ride that silly machine for twenty minutes without a book, so I irritably wandered upstairs to the library.

When we moved into this house, the old owners left a few books behind. I love books. I collect them and have since I was in junior high school. The library had plenty of room, so I never bothered to even go through the books to see if any of them were worth reading. I haven't had much time for reading lately. As I perused the collection, my eye fell on a book I had never noticed before, one left behind by the old owners. It said something about left-brained kids. At that moment, I heard one of the kids walking up the stairs and realized that I had to hurry if I was going to exercise before it was time to get them out the door to school. I grabbed the book and rushed downstairs.

I spent a few minutes programming the elliptical and getting into a rhythm, and then opened the book to the "forward." It was a description of the author going through a struggle with her son. Immediately, phrases started jumping off the page as each sentence contained the very keywords I had been searching on the internet. My breathing sped up as my movement on the elliptical slowed down. I felt tears forming in my eyes that I immediately wiped away so I could see the pages. I never finished my twenty minutes exercising. I sat on the floor and read my story through the eyes of a different mother.

One thing you have to understand about miracles is that they are never immediate. My child's struggle isn't going to go away because I read a book. No, the real miracle here isn't that I now have a magical formula to fix every problem in our home. The miracle is that Heavenly Father heard my prayer and took the time to speak back. Do you know what he said? He told me, "I love you. I hear you. And I want you to know that I love that child as much as you do. We'll help him together."

And miracles like that happen ALL the time.

One For Me

I recently went through a trial. It doesn’t matter what it was. The thing is that I knew for some time before the actual events that it was a possibility. I knew that it might happen and I knew how it would make me feel. At least, I thought I did. 

Anticipation of a negative event is a funny thing. It gives us the opportunity to prepare ourselves and to decide exactly how our heart and head will react. Then, if the trial never actually comes, we can feel a sense of accomplishment because we lived it vicariously and know that we would have handled it very well.  Most of my life has been lived in this world of anticipation and avoidance of trials. I have cried real tears for mothers who have lost children, sat up late at night feeling sick over injustices read about on the news, and wrote bold words of empathy and comfort to friends who have dealt with tragedies that I have only ever experienced in my mind. 

I stand, constantly, in a torrent of difficult trials, like a tornado tearing up the Earth around me. I am in the eye, where it is quiet and calm. But for one day, I was forced out of my comfort zone and the torrent sucked me inside. 

It’s not the events that matter, but my reaction. You see, I did not react as I had planned to. I did not feel what I had known I would. I did not muster the grace or class or control that I had anticipated and planned for. I found my heart unexpectedly broken, my impeccable sense of logic completely MIA, and my strength sapped. 

But I learned something. For the first time in my life, I think I finally know why the atonement of Christ was necessary. It’s never really made sense before. I watched all of the seminary videos about justice and mercy. I still didn’t understand. I assumed there was some greater natural law that I couldn’t comprehend which necessitated Christ’s sacrifice in exchange for our redemption. The heartlessly cruel requirement that an innocent Savior suffer for someone else’s crime did not square at all with my perception of a loving, nurturing Father. 

I have never been one to pray for trials.  It’s been my assessment that I can know a fire’s heat without feeling it burn. But this past week I realized that my world view is wrong. Without the actual experience, I can know that a burn is painful, but not what it feels like. It turns out that those are two very different things.

Having my heart broken taught me that I cannot even begin to anticipate the pain of life’s trials, that I don’t understand what another person is feeling just because I can imagine having to face a similar situation, and that I am not nearly as kind of a person as I should be. It also taught me that the Atonement of Jesus Christ may have served a purpose in meeting the demands of justice. But, the purpose I need to understand better is the one it served in qualifying our Savior to be our advocate with the Father. 

We live in a cruel world. The tendency to criticize is strong and seductive. But I am beginning to learn that kindness and compassion are probably the most powerful forces on Earth. 

I am still not ready to pray for trials. But I am writing these feelings down today in hopes that when I am securely back in the calm, quiet eye of the storm, I will not forget how little I know about the trials around me. 

As the primary song says, “I want to be kind to everyone; for that is right, you see.” I want to be kind to those who I disagree with, to those who make bad decisions, to those who don't like me, and to those who I think are cruel. I'm going to need a lot of help getting there, but I'm starting to understand where I can find it.