Random Thoughts on No Kidding: Totally stolen from folks I have no right to steal from

I have 3 children. I also have a husband and 3 cats and a big house and a Mazda 5 and an organic garden and an archery certification from girl scouts, but for the most part, most people define me by that first sentence.

I live on a block with many families of children. Quick numbers by households with current children living at home: 3, 3, 2, 1, 1, 3, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4. And so we're known for this--lots of kids in stable homes (meaning, we've all lived here a while, like, most of our children were born here). We--those with kids and those without--also play some mah jongg and poker and have barbecues and block parties and fight crime, but for the most part, people know we're the block right by the park "with all the kids."

And, like being white and being Catholic in a Catholic city, I think nothing of this. We are the standard issue around here.

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My brother has one child, and he and his wife recently had a stillborn son (miscarriage? stillborn? he was right on the cut-off). They plan to try again soon. I have three kids. My two sisters do not have children. I think Colleen may, some day, maybe. I don't think Bevin will. This became pretty clear as Bevin went to college and then since then. My mother lamented one of her break-ups by saying, "but think what beautiful children you would have had," and Bevin replied that neither of them were interested, really. Mali, who writes a blog about being childless in New Zealand (although I don't think the NZ part is really key--she just happens to live there), wrote a recent entry about how childless people are seen as selfish, but I never though of Bevin this way. Now, I think Colleen IS selfish (as she herself would admit) but not because of her child status. She just is.

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Speaking of selfish, I do know a childless couple who announced very early in their marriage that they weren't having children because they didn't want to share. That was their public reason. Mike and I laughed a lot, privately, because "sharing" was never a dealbreaker for us (we're both from large families). Other reasons, maybe. But then I considered later that maybe this was their slap-in-the-face public reason to keep people off their backs.

It of course didn't work. People callously tried to convince them they should have children. People with lots of children, of course. "You just don't know how they'll change your life." And I told them that too many people had children for the wrong reasons and knowing your own mind was important. It was a teaching moment for me. It keeps me off my sisters' backs.

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I have another friend who is childless, also by choice, and said once at a dinner party that kids were the "flat tires on the road of life." She managed to alienate pretty much the whole room: folks with children, folks who couldn't have children, hell, even folks who had once BEEN children.

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Sitting with friends, talk eventually turns to people you know in common. Always. Even if you don't mean to gossip, in a negative way, you wind up talking about folks you know. And questions arise: "Are they going to have children? Do you know? Has she said anything? Are they trying?"

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Mike is the oldest of 4. I am the oldest of 4. That's a big number these days, as Indigo pointed out. People just don't have 4 children anymore, right? Not if they're sane. But I know several families larger than that. Then people assume they're strict fundamentalists or conservative Catholics. But none of them fits that description either, and many of the evangelical and strict Catholic families I know have 2 children.

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My cousin is pregnant with twins. My first question on the phone to my mother was whether it was IVF. Turns out it was, but why do I care?

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Back to selfish. I can't remember if it was Bevin who said it or someone else, but I'm going to attribute it to her. She said that she just didn't think she could take the heartache of children. And I understood. I had no idea, going in. None.

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I would have had more children. Seriously. If my pregnancies weren't ridiculous and my births even more so, I could have had 5. That said, I have certainly reached my level of incompetence with 3. So maybe it's for the best. Still, I am keeping a door open in my heart. Too many older children waiting in state foster care, "aging out" to a lonely young adulthood. But as Tiffany at school said, "there's lots of babies in the world and I don't have to have any more of them" (she adopted a waiting older child herself after having 2).

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Indigo mentioned that this was the most earth-friendly decision she made, to not have children. And it probably was. But what was mine? That's what I asked myself. I think it was recycling a whole house and not buying new.

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My grandmother has a keychain made of pony beads on her car keys. "Haven't seen the grandchild in 20 years but still have the keychain she made." She said it flippantly but it was meant more emotionally charged. It opened a tunnel into the future, a dim view of lost connections and people who are part of you, in a way, that are no longer people you know. Nobody plans to have a family fall apart. Megan and Erin. Last time I saw them, I was 8.

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My grandmother's older brother Harold drowned in a creek at the bottom of the hill out in Maries County. He's listed in the 1920 census and then he's not in the 1930. They buried him on the property, no headstone. They moved away and never came back. Maybe Bevin is right.