When people ask Margarget Drye, of Plainfield, about her family during small talk, it quickly turns into a long conversation.
“People’s jaws still drop when I say we have nine kids,” said Drye, whose children now range in age from 19 to 38.
Drye and her husband Rob, who works in IT, never really discussed having a large family, she said, but just felt right about adding more children.
“We never really philosophized about it,” Drye said. “Adding one more wasn’t hard.”
Drye homeschooled the family, so the siblings were together often. That gave the kids an appreciation of all different ages, Drye said. Sometimes, however, Drye felt like she had three different families.
“The bottom three don’t know all the people and events that the oldest three did,” she said. “The youngest was a baby when oldest went to college.”
Now that Drye’s children are grown, she sometimes wonders how she did it. That’s because she feels busier than ever today, with a nearly-empty nest. Chores that she used to delegate — like walking the dog or doing the dishes — are now hers alone.
“I’m still home trying to find free time that I expected,” said Drye.
Michele Frenkiewich, a New London mom of five, is still waiting to have free time. Her children range in age from 6 to 16, and she said that navigating the age range is sometimes more challenging than taking care of so many kids.
“Right now, we have teens and a kindergartener,” she said. “Between school, homework and extra activities, sometimes we’re pulled in a lot of different directions. You just don’t have the amount of time that you would have for one or two.”
Frenkiewich and her husband Brian, a physician, didn’t plan on quite such a large family. They had the first four children in six years, and thought they were done. But after a miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy, their fifth child rounded out the family.
Unlike Drye, Frenkiewich found each addition to her family challenging. However, the joys of a large family were outweighed by the temporary challenge of an infant, she said. Having a partner that she could count on made having so many children more manageable.
“In order to survive the growth of your family, you have to have some sort of a good marriage,” she said.
Having five kids makes choosing a car or booking a hotel more complicated, Frenkiewich said. She also deals with comments and misconceptions, that she doesn’t believe in birth control or that her family is somehow a drain on the system, she said. Still, she is happy with her family’s format.
“We make up for it, because we all try to be there for each other,” she said. “In the end, after all the fights, you catch one caring about something for another child that you don’t think they’d care about. I just hope that they continue to have a good relationship.”