You’re Stopping Now…Right?

I have four children under seven, I’ll admit it. For many people inside and outside of Catholic circles, is a hard pill to swallow. That I would actually, consciously decide to have four children that close together.

So now that my youngest is getting older, he’s six months old by the way, there’s a particular question that I get asked a LOT.

‘So you’re stopping now…right?’

Good question, and I’ll answer it later. You see, once this question is posed I barely have time to answer before the person asking me details how, why and when they decided they had ‘finished’ their family and how they halted any further chances of pregnancy.

There was the Preschool Director who told me that she basically told her husband that they were done – she has two boys – and that because she was the one who had to go through the agony of child bearing, it was his turn and so a vasectomy followed.

Then there was the mother I play social netball with on Wednesday mornings. She detailed how her two children were the results of IVF and that at the end of that process they had two healthy children, a ‘pigeon pair’, and no remaining eggs so that felt like a good time to stop. But just to make sure, she also encouraged her husband to have a vasectomy too.

By this point I was starting to feel as though these women might have been presenting this as a question but they were really saying, look, whatever form of birth control you’re using is not working, get your hubby to have a vasectomy.

Even if I wasn’t diametrically opposed to vasectomies for a whole gamut of reasons, which I most certainly am, there is a couple in our acquaintance whose marriage failed spectacularly after he had a vasectomy. Now you might think I’m stretching it a bit but hear me out. This couple married young and were blessed with five children in quick succession. They were generous and outgoing and really genuine people. Then, after baby number five he had a vasectomy to prevent any further additions to their family.

But this, like any contraception or artificial sterilisation, is a sure-fire way to kill the love in your marriage and to make cheating a lot easier. And that’s exactly what happened. Within eighteen months of his vasectomy, he began an affair with a work colleague, leaving his wife and children on Father’s Day, of all days.

When you are not open to life, you are not open to love. Yes, my husband and I have had four children close together (by today’s standards anyway) but as I say to these women, ‘I will never say never. I don’t know what the future holds.’

God may intend for many more children to bless our lives, or another one, or maybe none at all. But as a fiercely Catholic woman, I will count my blessings and accept every one of them lovingly.

I know, if and when number five arrives, things will become very difficult for me personally. There are members of my immediate family who thought I was crazy for having number four and felt they had to speak to me and encourage me to stop before we needed a bus (because that is a scary proposition for them). Just as an aside Master 6 actually wants us to have a bus, because all of the other ‘cool’ families at his school have at least an 8 seater mini van, and my children all would love more siblings. I know there will be less support from some, but more from others, and as much as it hurts that people are unwilling to see that I am happy with my own life choices, how many children we may or may not have doesn’t actually concern them.

We are already considered freaks by some and this actually makes me quite sad. I mean, when did we as a society, get to a point where we treat children as a commodity and in doing so, lose the profound joy we should feel in the birth of new life, and appreciation for the blessing of actually having children? Having children is so much more than just something on your life’s bucket list.

So maybe having number 5, 8, or 10, children is unfathomable to others but it’s not to me. Forcing my husband to undertake radical surgery to prevent any further offspring, I consider that to be unconscionable.

So, in answer to your question…

No, I am not stopping now.

Originally posted 2014-08-05 03:53:24.