Seven babies. That's truly, truly amazing. I don't know how they're going to manage it, but a couple over in Iowa now have seven babies all alike.
Am I abnormal for not wanting to go through that? I was out on the Dan Ryan tonight listening to the afternoon public radio new program, All Things Considered, and at some point during coverage of the McCoy family in Iowa, they had some commentary by a man in Boston who had been one of eighteen children.
Yes, I know that at a time in the past in America, families of that scale were not as uncommon as they are now. What caught my ears about that particular commentator was the mention that his mother had undergone twelve caesarean sections!
That, my dear readers, is where I get off this bus. Once, yes. Twice, perhaps. Three would be excessive. Twelve is beyond the pale.
I didn't actually catch how the septuplets were delivered. One thing's sure: I hope they're done. Eight children should be enough for anyone. I was thinking that their two-year-old daughter will doubtless have problems as she grows up, as her seven siblings get all the media attention. Some time ago, I read an excellent book on the Dionne quintuplets, and it described many of the difficulties they had from being the focus of so much attention so long ago.
This is 1997, a far cry from the 1930s, and the media attention on these children will be incredible. I feel for them, and hope their parents will gain a wisdom that will steer them toward giving their children as normal an upbringing as can be possible in America in 1997.
I've thought a little about children. I don't know that I want any. I don't know that I don't... sometimes I think it might be tempting, but so many people seem to have children for what I think are the wrong reasons...
Wrong? Yes, wrong, I think. The old cliche about having a baby to save a marriage. I've seen enough already to know that rarely works. If the marriage was cracking, the strain of children will surely break it. Few people have the antique notion of "staying together for the sake of the children," and so to some extent I think this outlook condemns the children to watching their parents eat each other alive.
My parents seemed very happy. Happier than the parents of some friends in high school and college. It wasn't fun, for example, watching my friend Chris' parents' marriage self-destruct as an audience of her teenage friends looked on. Chris was patient, Chris was a good girl. Chris' parents were from another planet. Chris was the first teenage alcoholic I ever knew. I think I understood why, but it didn't make it any easier. She and I drifted apart after her parents finally separated in our junior year, and in senior year she moved to Milwaukee to live with her mother. Just like that, the waters closed over her memory and she seemed to vanish into the haze.
I never saw anything like that with my parents. They seemed to genuinely like and respect each other. I didn't seem to be an object of contention or stress, and because I was the only child they had, I was only a minor impediment to them continuing to live their lives as they had done so before.
I just read that sentence again. "Impediment." That isn't quite the tone I intended. Let me think for a moment. What I mean is that I think few people get to see their parents the way they were before they themselves were ever born. The act of parenting changes your parents, and not always for the better. I never, while I was growing up, had to listen to wistful, nostalgic stories about the things my parents did before I was born. The stories were of things they did before I was born, yes, but they were also of these same things they still did. They managed to figure out a way to have me and have a real life, too. They continued to travel, they continued to have a wide range of friends. They brought me along in all of this, introducing me to many things I still enjoy now. Cross-country skiing. Cycling. Cooking simple, straightforward food. Thinking and reading and writing and music.
I'm old enough to have seen friends vanish into a sort of gray haze of motherhood -- or parenthood. People who, at a seemingly young age, have given up some major portion of their lives to become that gray thing, Parent. They give up the Porsche, buy a minivan, she foregoes the partnership in the law firm, staying home with Child. Child who is somehow more important than whatever life she had before. They can't ever go out and enjoy their friends from before, because they are at the whim of Babysitter. As a result, somehow all of their friends either get married and have babies, too... or their friends vanish.
I've been one of the friends who've been left by the wayside, and I didn't like it. Never. I always felt hurt. This little thing, not yet possessed of a personality, taking a tyrannical precedence over even the oldest adult friend.
If I have children, I want to figure out how my parents had me, and do it that way.
And I'm having one!
Fargo is getting over his cold. He hasn't gotten over periodically throwing up all over the kitchen floor, of course, but his breathing seems easier and he seems to have more energy tonight.