I am going to reveal the sick side of my nature. When my husband and I had two sons, we began to consider our options: stopping at two or going on to have a third child. My husband was leaning towards sticking with the nice, solid, balanced number 2, but was open to hearing arguments for 3.
Here’s where I get ‘sick’. I didn’t want to have just 2 kids, because that seemed “manageable”. Sick, right? I mean, what’s wrong with manageable? But somehow that just didn’t feel right to me.
I didn’t want to be able to pull off the perfect little family, with everyone always looking neat and clean and wearing just the right clothes with all the wrinkles ironed out and all the colors or styles perfectly matching. I didn’t want my house to always look clean and orderly. I didn’t want a place for everything and everything in its place.
I knew I was going to invest myself heavily in this mother role and I didn’t want to overwhelm my husband and kids with the amount of energy I planned to give to it. I had stored up energy for this role. I would over do on a few. I needed to spread it out a bit.
Now it’s not that I wanted a complete disaster area to live in and my family looking like neglected slobs or abandoned orphans either. I wanted something in between. I wanted a healthy challenge. I wanted life to error towards abundance, towards fullness, towards almost beyond my ability. I wanted a creative, slightly skewed look to life - not an uninteresting, perfectly symmetrical design.
Of course, I didn’t really know what I was looking for or the fact that every family is out of balance in several ways, regardless of how many people are in the family. Personalities bring an incredible array of creative non-symmetry in life. Challenges abound in raising children and establishing a family whether you have one child or twenty. I was young.
But I was also convincing! And so my husband and I decided to add to our little brood. A daughter came on the scene and it felt as if a complete family was born. The door could be shut, because everyone was in. This third child was up on all fours, rocking herself back and forth in the crawl position as if about to blast off at the age of four months! She was walking at 8 months and climbing up on and over every barrier we constructed for her safety (and our sanity!) We knew right then and there that “adding” a child is more like “multiplying” your work load. I had arrived at that place I thought I was looking for: Happy chaos! You know it looks so cute in the movies! I was busy, but in an enviable way, it seemed to me.
However, I guess we hadn’t shut all the doors or someone else reopened one, because we discovered one more blessing was on the way. Surprised, but not dissuaded, we regrouped in our minds and imagined an even sweeter family dynamic.
Again, this was not addition. It wasn’t a matter of 3 kids + 1 kid = 4 kids. No. This meant multiplication. There were unknown exponents, like x and y, a and b, that were factoring in with every child. 1x + 2y + 3a + 4b = ????? Exponents like individual personalities, compliant or strong-willed dispositions, learning styles, strengths and weakness, not to mention birth order influences, were a part of each child’s make up. Not only was each child a unique, and still not totally known combination of factors, but each “combination” was interacting with the “combination” of the others. In fact, what once seemed to merely be a matter of figuring out a quiet math equation on a squeaky clean white board, now felt more like trying to control the potentially explosive results in the chemistry laboratory of a passionate scientist.
My desire to not be fully in control of this family experiment was met…and beyond. I have never tamed the beast…but I love it just the same. It, our family, is more than I can handle. Not a one of us looks like the flat, 2 dimensional image that will grace a parenting or family magazine. I haven’t cleaned us all up, haven’t got everyone dotting all their i’s and crossing all their t’s. I’m still working on convincing them that some “polite manners” are more than just show and that learning to compromise with their siblings will have big pay-offs in their future work and relationships.
But here’s what I hope they take with them: The undeniable, deep-seated sense of being loved for who they are and the confidence and ability to love others who are less-than-image-perfect.
