Having one child is like having one child. Having two children is like having 3. The two children and the relationship between them. Having three kids is like having 6! The three children and the 3 different relationships between them.

My cousin’s wife found this out by experience when she really, really wanted a third child. Everyone told her it wasn’t going to be like adding one more. She didn’t believe it, until she was parenting three. Then she said, it was exponential.

And my mother used to say, no matter how many children you have, you have one more, meaning my then-non-existent husband.

I’m enjoying having a flock of children around this week. College girl is home for spring break and we have college age kids hanging out here…having a blast…at this exact moment they are in the driveway making masks out of paper mache ostentably to be used for the upcoming Harry Potter book and movie. But who knows what they will use it for. I hear lots of laughter. I think they are masking my littlest girl too. I don’t think the older little could bear to have her face stilled (me neither) until it dries.

One girl has lived with us at two different times due to her father’s work postings and will stay with us frequently for long periods when college girl is back in town. She is my almost-daughter. I love her like one. One boy has been out of the picture for a couple of years and is now back in it.

I even said growing up that I wanted my home to be the hang-out place for my children, rather than having my kids go hang out at other places. That said, it is not the same as having 3 college kids of my own which I raised to this point plus grown son, plus the littles. It would certainly change the relationship I had with each of my kids and would also afford different relationships between the sibs. And each of those parameters would have an effect on the other.

I would have had to run just to catch up with myself.

I was fortunate in some ways as my first three children were all 9 years apart. I had plenty of one-on-one with each of them. And they had friendships of a sort with each other because there were long stretches of time when the littler was too little to really be a companion to the older. But there was next to no sibling rivalry.

Then along came child # 4 who was only about 2 years younger than child # 3…and the fur began to fly big time. Now they are very close friends, but getting to this point was a journey for me. I thought I was gonna die, LOL.

I see the example of Angelina Jolie who is mothering a brood of children, and either she is in for a rude awakening or she is a far, far better woman than I am. Of course, outside the essential differences of the amount of help each of us has (which is truly incomparable), our ages, the degree of how well known we are (or are not), we are completely alike. Not!

I wish her the best in all ways, including her children, who deserve the best.

Seeing celebs adopting is a little surreal. Didn’t many of us think we were born to be royal but somehow we were mixed up at the hospital? I can’t imagine living in a fishbowl, never having done it.

But the jury is still out as to what a lifetime will bring. And holding up celebs as a reason to do anything or how to do anything is just not living in the real world.

And when it is held up as something to strive for oneself, well, that just borders on the ridiculous.

And when celebs are discussed or joked about or the subject of skits that filter down to the average parent, their story is seen as our story or our children’s stories.

When one person is seen as a collector of children does that make the rest of us collectors? At what point is a person a collector — more than one country? 5 kids? a dozen kids? 20 kids? 25 kids? at what point is a home really another type of orphanage? is a collector always, by definition, someone who has collected more kids than we have? (In other words, if we were a collector, would we even know it or acknowledge it?) (It is totally impossible to catch up with someone who is a collector of children, they will always outpace you in the number of children they gather.)

I’m glad I’m not a social worker, determining what is reasonable or not.

It might be that the TR internationally adopted child raised with many siblings does better than the singleton for a variety of reasons, even the fact that typical close bonding to parents is not a requirement, something s/he might not be capable of. But it wouldn’t be a first choice for me anyway.

I met my match when I had only two close in age. I’m not capable of more.

Paul Harvey used to say: And now the rest of the story.

Many of us are living it. Page 2, indeed.

Karin

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Adoption, Parenting