I have seven children. Yeah, that’s right SEVEN. Usually, when I drop this little bomb there is a gasp. Then the questions start. Let’s get those out of the way right now.
No, I am not Catholic, nor am I Mormon, or a moron. I don’t know why everybody who has a lot of kids has to be one or the other or stupid. As a matter of fact, while writing this I did a little search and found several web pages that start out pretty much the same way this post did. Apparently even Mormons and Catholics are accused of being either Mormon or Catholic, go figure…
Last year I met a adorable woman whose son was playing soccer with mine, she asked if he was my only child. I love when people ask this, the reaction when you let loose is priceless. When I broke the news, she was sympathetic, she has four and ‘everybody thinks you are a freak around here if you have more than two’. Because people like me are desperate for adult conversation, I continued. I went on to tell her about how everybody always accuses me of being either Catholic or Mormon.
“I am Mormon”, she said.
“Well there you go, you can work that one then”, I replied, feeling as stupid as I should have.
She insisted that the church doesn’t FORCE you to have a large family. She sounded a little defensive, apparently this is a touchy subject. I saw her at the next game but this time I had my grandson. When she asked who he was I told her he was my grandson, the half Jamaican/Indian spawn of my lesbian daughter. She said I looked too young to be a grandmother and I told her that my daughter was only 19 when he was born, the result of a drunken dalliance with men. She never spoke to me again.
Yes, they are all mine… what? I borrow kids to freaking shock people?
Yes by BIRTH and to respond to the inevitable next question,yes, all vaginally, why that’s anybodys freaking business is beyond me. To clarify, only women would ask this. It’s like a measure of how hard core you really are, like I have challenged them or something. It’s like they think if you actually committed (willingly or otherwise) to having female parts that flap in the wind you’re legit. Don’t get me wrong, I can see why women do this, I have used this to my advantage at times. When someone sees one of my tattoos and asks if it hurt I can reply,
“I gave birth vaginally to seven children”, no, the tattoo didn’t hurt. Or,
“You had to have a 6 inch needle poked into your breast for a biopsy? That must really hurt!”
“Nah,I’ve had seven children travel down my birth canal and exit my body, the biopsy was nothing.
A man would never ask this simply because the mental picture of what a vagina might become after seven births is simply incomprehensible.
No, there were no twins, triplets, quads or any other large-group births. I did it seven times. Don’t worry, I don’t remember most of the actual births. There is a childbirth God that watches over you and makes you forget all about that by the time you are able to conceive again. I had the first four without medication. Well, technically, I had something for pain. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure it was actually a smartie. I think the OB nurses give you the “medication” and then they either enjoy watching you suffer thinking it isn’t working, or, they enjoy watching you THINK that it is working. Either way, I’m pretty sure they are making fun of you when they’re not in the room. I’m silent and trance-like when I am in pain so the nurses and Dr’s would pop in and start talking to me like I was lucid. Apparently the silent nodding meant all was right with the world and they would ask if my contractions had stopped since I was no longer “in pain”. Sorry I’m not screaming like the woman in the next room, EVERY SINGLE TIME I have a contraction.
The last three were born thanks to the wonders of the epidural. The only reason anyone would welcome having a 4 inch needle stuck into their spinal column is because they are already in a decent amount of pain.
When I hear someone like Gisele Bundchen say, “It wasn’t painful, not even a little bit.” I can’t help it, I want to punch her out.
No, I am not a Saint. Dictionary.com says a saint is: a person of great holiness, virtue, or benevolence.
uRbaN dictionary says a saint is: The name of a recording artist from West Phoenix. “Saint puts it down for the hip-hop game!”” If Willy Northpole gots the Southside, then Saint gots the West.”“MC”. In any case, it takes years, you have to be dead and you must produce a miracle, or at the very least, you have to “gots the West”.
Although I am probably closer to the latter than the former, either way, I don’t cut it, not even close.
Yes I have “my hands full”. Then again, so does anyone with a full-time job of any kind, even one kid means you have your hands full unless you have a full-time nanny.
What does “hands full” actually mean anyway. If you have a glass if wine in one hand and a beer in the other, your hands are full. Don’t get me wrong, it’s harder to master larger meals and schedules and stuff, but we’re not the freaking Duggars here. No, each of my kids does not get individual attention every day. Until the age when they can shower on their own and are inclined to do so (think junior year of high school), my kids might not be really clean all the time, or any of the time. My house might be a mess, if you can’t handle cat puke on the carpet and dirty underwear on the stairs, don’t come over. I do kind of wish that we had curtains on the front windows though in case someone other than the Watchtower people does come to the door uninvited.
No, actually I never have thought about the fact that I’m overpopulating the world. Nor do I think I am stealing the food out of mouths of children in developing countries, I think government pretty much has the corner on that market. I prefer to think one of my children may be the one to cure cancer. Then they will be responsible for overpopulating the world.
When I was pregnant with my third, my sister asked me how I FELT about it. This might seem like a pretty innocuous question, but you have to know my sister. My sister had already made it clear that IF her and her husband EVER decided to raise a child together, it would be a special needs child adopted from a country where it had absolutely no chance of a normal life. She just couldn’t feel right about bringing another child into this world of chaos and injustice. So asking how I FELT about it was really more like saying, “you crazy bitch, stop already.” Suffice it to say, I I let my mom tell her about the next four.
My sister had not been actively using birth control for several years which led me to believe one of two things; either they weren’t having sex (seemed plausible) or she was infertile (seemed obvious based on the family fertility factor). By age 32 my sister was pregnant, they had decided that they could deal with the guilt of adding one additional child to the world. When she was gaining more weight than seemed reasonable for her (almost) 5’2” frame she committed another mortal sin, the ultrasound. Unnecessary technology would tell her she was going to have twins. Now someone tell me there isn’t a God. The woman who wanted a home birth for the single child she would bring into the world, naturally and without medication, would be having a hospital birth, with copious medication and technology involved. This, my friends, is poetic justice.
Back to me.
Yes, there was more than one dad. I was divorced and remarried, yes they’re all mine..yes by birth, see above. For the record, there are only two dads. I could have tried for the home-grown version of Brangelina but I would not have been as famous, nor am I as rich. On the other hand, I could have been getting child support for each one and this might have helped fund my inevitable STD treatments.
Yes. I do know how this is happening, thanks. A teacher that three of my daughters had told me that I was welcome to come and sit in on the “Family Life” portion of the class if I thought I needed a refresher. (Shout out to Mrs. Reynolds, the greatest teacher alive). Since said teacher only has one child, I might have told her she was welcome to “sit in” on my life to see how to it’s done.
Now that I am done clearing those things up I just have a couple of myths I would like to dispel. First, not everyone loses the baby weight within the first three weeks after the birth. This is what women like Heidi and Gisele would have you believe. This is definitely more likely the first time around, and very much more likely if you don’t throw down the “checkered flag on eating” as my dad puts it. The most I gained during any pregnancy was 25 pounds. Somehow I have managed to hold onto 20 of those pounds with each birth. They tell you that the baby and various other things like placenta, fluid, and boobs ad up to about 25 pounds, so why the hell did I weigh the same after the freaking baby was born? Okay, I’m exaggerating, no seriously, I am. I actually used my phone to add up how much weight that would have been and I can tell you that I haven’t held onto that much… no seriously.
The thing that the stars always attribute the quick weight loss to is breastfeeding. I can tell you from experience that that is straight-up bullshit. It’s more likely that there is a personal trainer named something like Horst and/or a personal chef involved. How do I know this? Because I spent at least 168 months of my life breastfeeding, that’s why. I can tell you that it doesn’t really burn any damned calories at all. You are sitting on your ass for God’s sake, it’s not rocket science. Once you have your baby and decide to breastfeed, you spend the next several months on your ass. If you lose weight breastfeeding, by anyone’s calculations, I should have disappeared by now.
So there you have it. That’s me. Of course there is more to me than that, I’ll get to that stuff in time, but everything else is influenced by the fact that I have a large family, whether I like it or not.
It would have been fun to have a blog where I could be witty (like it’s possible for me) and fun, say things that make you think I’m cool and trendy and maybe even a hipster. In the end I decided that I would save that for online chat sites. Here, I will be me, take it or leave it.
Hi, my name is Carrie and…
