“How do you even cook dinner with three kids?” It was an honest question, asked with a mixture of awe and incredulity, by one of my husband’s co-workers, the father of an only child. I explained that my children help some, and we save their computer time for the end of the day when I’m trying to make dinner. The way he and his wife listened made me feel like I was relating the secrets of climbing Mt. Everest.

But the truth is, my knowledge of big family management is something more akin to scaling a knoll in the middle of a park.

Only the day before, my cousin had brought over a young woman he was getting to know, that he was eagar for our family to meet. She was the third born in a family with ten children. My husband and I were amazed by her. We were both essentially only children (I do have a brother, but he’s almost twelve years younger), so my husband and I, though very committed to having a houseful of children, don’t really know what we’re doing at all because we didn’t grow up watching our parents do it. We’re struggling, failing, re-evaluating, and learning from our mistakes. Watching this young woman made us see that we have miles to go in developing big family reflexes. Every time one of our children spilled something, she somehow beat us to the towels. I handed her a bowl of potatoes, and instead of just taking one, she asked me how much my children would eat. She had already counted them and seen that there were fewer potatoes than people at the table. Before I could get all my children served, she was out of her seat, asking them what they would like. She beat us at refilling sippy cups. She beat us at wiping down the table. And every time I turned around, she was asking me if I needed any help. It all came naturally to her because she’d lived it her whole life.

Life in a big family is a skill that we don’t learn anymore, sort of like churning butter, or sewing entire dresses by hand. In the modern world big families are oddities, so much so that a mother of three can be awe inspiring. And for those of us who greatly desire a large family, this can pose a rather significant problem because, just like Fezzic said in The Princess Bride, “you use different moves when you’re fighting half a dozen people than when you only have to be worried about one.” Raising three children is not the same as raising one child three times. The strategies are different. The balance is different. You use different moves.

What’s different? Well, so far, I’ve learned that it involves more scheduling, more delegating, more managing, more multi-tasking, less freedom for everyone, and let’s not forget a higher noise and chaos threshold. These are all things that are easy to write out in a tidy little list, but they’re hard to actually develop. They’re reflexes, like leaning forward slightly to keep your balance when you’re climbing uphill. And if you don’t have them, then life is hard. You might fall down and get scraped up.

I’m convinced that this is a major reason that people don’t want big families. They don’t know how to handle them. And they don’t realize that big family know how is a skill that can be learned. Unfortunately, most of us didn’t have the privilege of growing up third born in a line of ten, so we’re going to have to learn as we go. And that means plenty of hopeful bumbling, reading, watching big families if we get the chance, talking to people who know what they’re doing, followed by lots more bumbling.

But all of us should take heart. We CAN do it. There was a time when big families were normal. And that means that they were headed up by ordinary people, not as many assume today, by people with special child-loving genes, or innate multitasking talents–a discouraging assumption for those of us who often feel untalented or genetically challenged. No, they were just regular folks, as weak as we are, with the same one-track minds, the same need for sleep, the same emotional and spiritual resources. The only difference is that they knew a lot better how to handle all those children because they’d more than likely grown up in a big family themselves, and even if they didn’t, most of their neighbors had big families, so they could easily see what to do. We may not have those benefits, but we can futz our way along until we figure out the path. You don’t have to be born in Nepal to be a mountain climber. And we bumbling mortals, struggling up the knolls in the park, can learn to scale Everest one dinner at a time.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 12th, 2008 at 9:24 am and is filed under Homekeeping, Loving Our Children. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.