A post recently making the rounds on social media declared, with considerable confidence, that having nine children while running a business is irresponsible. The author, for her part, identifies as “pro-natalist, pro-kids, pro-family.” I read it with interest, because in addition to working as a legal analyst and running a small organization, I am also the mother of ten. By her accounting, I am apparently a cautionary tale.
Allow me to plead guilty. And offer some evidence.
On Adventure and Letting Go of Control
This past summer, I loaded the younger half of my children into the minivan for what I will generously describe as an ambitious itinerary: from the D.C. area to the Midwest to visit grandparents, then north to Niagara Falls, passing through Boston, then onward to Maine for the wedding of a dear friend’s daughter, and finally back to D.C. in time for the first day of school.
We made it. Barely.
Time with aging grandparents was precious. Niagara Falls received us with appropriate grandeur. Boston was engaging. The wedding was beautiful. And somewhere on our way back home from Maine, the fuel gauge staged a quiet protest. We coasted into the gas station on fumes and on prayer, with the latter offered in genuine unison, which is itself a minor miracle with this crew. The car held together.
These are the things you remember when you are old.
There is a particular grace that comes from traveling with children who have learned, through years of large-family life, to adapt. They do not expect perfection. They expect adventure and they know how to find it.
On Stepping Up and Learning to Lead
This past winter, my youngest fell seriously ill with complicated double pneumonia. After several sleepless nights at his bedside and the inevitable consequence of close proximity, I came down with it too. No mother who has ever held a sick child would think for a moment of keeping her distance, and I was no different.
What happened next is something I could not have engineered if I tried. The older children at home simply took over. Everyone got to school on time. Lunches were packed more or less nutritiously, which is all any of us can honestly claim. The house did not fall apart.
Some people might raise an eyebrow at teenagers taking on a parenting role. I call it the finest apprenticeship program in existence. There is no classroom that prepares you for parenthood the way a younger sibling does. You learn patience, responsibility, and love not as abstract concepts but as daily practice. When the moment came, my children knew exactly what to do because they had been practicing for years without realizing it.
On Joy and the Gift of Showing Up
Just this past Presidents’ Day, I piled my school-aged kids into the car for a four-hour drive to visit an older son and his wife, who had just welcomed their second child. We arrived bearing gifts and treats, spent the afternoon marveling at the energetic toddler, the new baby and at the particular delight of watching siblings become aunts and uncles, and then crammed back into the car for the drive home.
At one point, deep in an underground tunnel, we became convinced we were heading in the wrong direction. There was a brief moment of cheerful collective panic and more collective prayer. We emerged exactly where we were supposed to be. It turns out we had been on the right road the whole time. I will leave that without further comment.
It was a day worth every minute of the drive.
On Responsible Living at Scale
For those keeping score on the question of resources: one dress sees several daughters through its useful life. There is no food waste. A single ball produces an instant team. When a younger child hits calculus, there is an older sibling already through it and reachable by phone at college. A confirmation sponsor is built into the family structure. These are not hardships. They are the elegant efficiencies of a full house.
And with regard to professional development, I will say without false modesty that my executive functioning skills often (but not always) rival that of a Fortune 500 CEO or a military field commander.
On Colombia and the Witness of Abundance
At one point, I stepped away from practicing law to dedicate myself fully to raising my children. My family and I moved to Colombia, South America, where I was blessed with six more. The female obstetricians who attended one birth came back for the next. One told me that a few of the doctors had decided to have another child after our conversations. In a tender gesture I will never forget, she remarked that they began referring to them as los niños de Andrea.
It was not only the doctors. Colombians of an older generation who grew up in large families themselves would often seek me out to confide, with grief that needed no translation, that they wished they had not stopped at two.
Catherine Pakaluk captures something of this beautifully in Hannah’s Children, a luminous account of mothers of large families who found in them not diminishment but profound flourishing. Pakaluk, herself the mother of a large brood, and recently appointed executive director of the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America, brings both scholarly rigor and personal witness to a subject that deserves far more serious treatment than a social media post.
On Sorrow, Humility, and Sharing Them With God
I will not pretend that a large family shields you from life’s difficulties. It does not. There is estrangement, conflict, financial strain, and real heartbreak. Yes, the heart grows with each child and that also means an expanded surface area for suffering.
While a large family does not make a mother immune from pain, it helps develop greater steadiness in the face of it. You have navigated difficult things before. You know you are not navigating them alone. God is their Father and Mary is their Mother. You are always sharing them with Someone far more capable than yourself.
Having many children does not make one a perfect parent. But reliably, repeatedly, sometimes painfully, it makes you humble. You learn to ask forgiveness often. You learn to receive it too. And you learn, in the way that only life can teach, that your children were never entirely yours to begin with.
On Numbers, and What This Is Really About
Granted, I joke on my social media posts by numbering the kids when highlighting our adventures. But a large family is not a numbers game. Each child is their own beautiful, unique universe. And a family of eight is not holier or more admirable than a family of three.
My point is that a large family has been, for me, an extraordinary and unearned blessing. The woman on social media is entitled to her opinion. But opinions are changed less by arguments than by the witness of families who pile into minivans, coast into gas stations on fumes and prayer, show up at weddings, new births and bedsides, and keep going. And I would not have it any other way.