People who have only one or two children often marvel at those of us who have five or six. “I’m exhausted with just the one,” they may say, “I can’t imagine how you do it.” Sometimes they follow up with, “Um, so how do you do it?”
Through our own veils of exhaustion, we may say, “Oh, it’s not as bad as you think,” or “Well, everyone pitches in,” or “Not terribly well.”
But about five minutes ago the question was answered for me in a new way when our 5-year-old threw herself into the community swimming pool with a terrific splash.
Can she swim? No she cannot, because, what with the competing needs of the other children, we just didn’t get around to it last summer — or the summer before. We knew we ought to get lessons organized, but it fell through the cracks in the to-do list. I was faintly embarrassed about it; plus, it meant that someone always had to watch with special diligence when she went near the water.
Yet here the child was, flinging herself into the icy late-spring chlorine with abandon. She’s old enough to swim properly, she ought to know how to swim properly, and, by gum, it’ll probably only take a few lessons before she can in fact swim properly.
As the water she displaced sluiced over my feet, I realized that this sort of delay in part explains why larger families are not necessarily more exhausting than smaller ones: When there’s a mob of children, parents are much less likely to sweat the small developmental milestones. We love them just as much as we do their older siblings, but we are not in such a panic.
Thinking back to the early days of two children — we had no idea what, or who, was coming — we behaved, oddly enough, like the parents of one or two children. We spent hours helping toddlers pore over their letters and numbers. We booked them into swimming lessons early, and put them on bikes as soon as they could walk. Hitting the marks seemed very important.
Over time, that punctiliousness gave way. The next two children learned to read and swim a bit later than the first two, and the fifth is, as advertised, shockingly delinquent. Yet I have every confidence that this summer, she’ll catch up just fine — without the high-pressure environment that her eldest siblings experienced.
Now, it may just be that I’m just hoping to find virtue in my own fecklessness. If there are mothers out there with large families and impeccable records of teaching them all to swim and read and speak second languages before they get to first grade, well, I salute you!
Yet anecdote suggests that many more of us operate on a sliding scale of deferral. After focusing with laser vision on our first children, with each subsequent child we adjust the lens until we’re looking at the baby of the family through a rose-colored fuzz.
Judging from the shrieks of laughter coming from the pool, it doesn’t seem such a bad thing. She landed in the shallow end.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
