Opinion: Six wasn’t enough

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Get ready for the outrage over the fact that the mother of octuplets already had six children, and nevertheless sought ferility treatment to bear a seventh. (Other critics who take abortion lightly will also criticize for not ‘selectively reducing the number of embryos,’ as The Times’ story put it.)

It’s inconceivable (as it were) to many people that six wouldn’t be enough. My late mother would beg to differ. She, too, was the mother of six, but was widowed at the age of 37. I never had much doubt that had my father lived the brood would have grown. Several of my childhood friends had more siblings than I did. One friend was one of 13, another had 10 siblings. Among post-World War II Irish Catholics, such large families weren’t freakish. It was families with only two or three kids that aroused suspicion. Were they defying the pope?

I never had to explain life in a large family until I went to college and had to respond to well-intentioned questions from my Protestant dorm-mates including ‘How could your parents keep track of all those kids?’ and ‘Was it hard to develop an individual identity?’ I found these questions baffling.

For Mom motherhood wasn’t just a calling; it was a religion. She could be judgmental about women she considered ‘unfit mothers,’ a group in which she included Christa McAuliffe, the amateur astronaut who died in the Challenger explosion. Mom thought McAuliffe had no right to leave her children to go gallivanting in outer space. In supermarkets she would descend on mothers who were yelling at their children and say: ‘Why don’t you just kill him (or her) and be done with it?’

Before she died, Mom told me: ‘You know, I wouldn’t have minded having 20 children.’ She meant it, too, despite her frequent complaint that ‘no one in this family is normal.’ Maybe the octuplets’ mother felt the same way. As Mom and Jesus said: ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’