When my mom was a child, people would ask if she could name all her siblings. It happened so often that she practiced rattling them off rapidly in age order: Kathy, Ellen, Neil, Pat, Shiela, Wally, Mary, Timmy, Kevin, Thomas, Julie.
In case you weren’t counting, that’s 11 siblings. My mom, Coleen, fit between Mary and Timmy to round out group. My mom still tells stories about this tribe of siblings, anecdotes that make the movie Cheaper By The Dozen look downright boring. As a kid, I loved hearing how the family ate at an oversized picnic table in the kitchen, or about the siblings piling into a five-passenger sedan to go bowling or to a swimming pool. As adults, the siblings remain close, passing on the family bond to the 26 first cousins in the next generation.
With just four children, the family I grew up in was small compared to my mom’s, but we tried to match their adventurous spirits. As the oldest, I would lead elaborate schemes of digging “fossils” in our yard, which was littered with old chicken bones from previous owners, or bringing every pillow and blanket outside so we could jump off the second-story porch.
Two years in a row we spent our summer building a fort from scrap wood in the basement, my parents leaving us totally alone to figure out hammering, nailing and sawing. Shockingly, the four of us survived with all our fingers intact.
I can’t imagine how different my childhood would have been without my siblings and cousins. I always knew I wanted a big family, and when I met my husband, I nearly scared him off by insisting, with a straight face, that I wanted seven kids. He was one of two, and each of his parents had only one sibling. Even after 10 years together, he still finds my large, boisterous family overwhelming.
When we were dating and planning, sketching out the life we wanted together, we settled on three kids. It seemed like a good compromise, a band of siblings that was big enough for adventure, but small enough to manage.
Then, we had our first child. She was — shall we say — headstrong from the start. I was working from home, starting a business and my husband was doing overnight shifts. Like many households with two working parents, we felt totally overwhelmed by everything we had to accomplish in a day.
We started to consider whether we even wanted another child. We were enthralled with our daughter, and she seemed perfectly happy with “just” us. Yet, to even consider having an only child I had to take an honest look at my judgments about what made a family. The highlights of my childhood are closely tied to the relationships with my siblings, but eventually I realized that was just my experience. My husband had equally fond memories from his smaller family, and so did my friends who were only children.
Today, there are so many pressures on families. In most homes, both parents work. The cost of childcare is astronomical, forcing some people to plan their families based on daycare costs. Kids are in more activities, and our culture has evolved to favor a more gentle and connected approach to parenting which is wonderful, but intensive and time consuming. Then there’s the environmental considerations: having one fewer child is the biggest way an individual can minimize their carbon footprint.
Those are the easy issues to talk about, but let’s not gloss over the fact that raising children is downright exhausting. Being a mom depletes me physically, mentally and emotionally in ways that still aren’t fully acknowledged or talked about. With more choices than ever for family planning and choosing the family that is right for us, it’s no surprise that people are opting to have fewer kids. It’s becoming more socially acceptable for people to own their limits and desires, whether that means having just one child or being childfree entirely.
I did have a second daughter, born four years after my first. It took my family that long to be sure that having another child was right for us. Now, we’re asked all the time whether we’ll be “trying for a boy.” At the same time, I know from friends with four or more kids that they sometimes get snide comments about choosing a large family. For other friends, family size hasn’t been a choice, since infertility or other challenges limited family they envisioned.
Cheesy though it may be, what makes the family isn’t the number of people around the table, but the love and connection between them. Family size is intensely personal, so I’m glad to live in a time when there’s no wrong answer: parents can be honest about the family size that works best for them.
While I am forever thankful for my large family, and the memories I cherish with my own siblings and cousins, I have accepted the fact that creating my own family looks different, and that’s OK.