A Quiver Full of Noisy, Crying, Bickering Arrows

Note:  Do not let the title of this post, nor the related reference, mislead you into thinking I'm a member of the "Quiverfull" movement.  I do not subscribe to the idea that every couple is called to have as many children as physically possible, nor do I subscribe to many beliefs peripherally associated with the movement.

 I have always wanted a big family.  While it's true that Catholicism condemns the use of contraceptives (including contraceptive methods of completing the sexual act) as grave sin, that's not the reason behind my wanting a big family, as if I actually only wanted a kid or two if not for my religion.  For one thing, to explain to those of you who don't know the Catholic teaching, the Church allows Natural Family Planning, a selection of methods of determining when the wife is fertile or not, so that IF there is *serious reason to avoid having children at a given time the couple can simply refrain from sexual contact during the wife's fertile phase each month (or for some couples, the phases immediately surrounding it).  So my desire for a big family is not due to some mandate that I simply should have one, as there are many Catholics who may well have serious enough reasons that they aren't called to that.

For another thing, I've wanted a big family since long before my conversion to Catholicism.  I had barely entered puberty, really, when I first started dreaming of having a family of six children.  In hindsight, my dream was small compared to some families I've seen, but certainly large by the standards of our prevailing culture, with its "ideal" prescription of precisely 2.5 children per household.

It's hard, though, to depict child #2.5 in a visual.

Over the weekend, my wife and I visited my best friend and his family.  He lives two states away, and it was actually the first time we'd met in person, despite being friends for a year and a half, and close friends for quite a big portion of that.  He and his wife have five children, all of the age of eight (though close to nine) and under.  Incidentally, the couple are young enough to have more, if they find themselves called to it.  For now, though, their hands are rather full already, and it was easy to see why.  Their children were, down to the last of them, incredibly sweet and respectful toward us, but they were not--just as my friend had warned me--low energy children, by any stretch of the imagination.

The room was always abuzz with noise and activity.  Children got into arguments, hit each other, cried, screamed, yelled, chased each other, tried to get into things they weren't allowed to do, had to be called on multiple times and sometimes physically made to cease whatever they were doing, and more.  Now, these friends are incredibly skilled parents, so each solitary instance of chaos--at least, if the chaos had mischievous or disobedient causes--was almost immediately taken care of by them, and in general the children ultimately humbled themselves before their parents with impressive consistency (another testament to these friends' parenting).  But energetic children can have short attention spans, so before long something new--often different, to the kids' credit, from whatever they'd just been told not to do or had been disciplined for doing--would come up, and the parents, already travel-weary from the long drive to the hotel where we were all staying, had to be on top of it all over again.

Several times, both my wife--intimidated as she was by the scene--and my best friend's wife would turn to me and jokingly (sometimes maybe only half-jokingly!) ask whether I was yet scared out of my own ambitions toward having a big family.  My answer each time was, without hesitation, "No."  Their resolution, of course, was to "try harder."  Because my wife's a total dear that way.

"Hey, his dreams are still alive.
We're gonna need a backup plan."

Be all that as it may, I'm still quite set on having a big family, if God and my wife are willing.  In fact, seeing the beautiful family of our friends has only made me want such a family even more than before, because where there was chaos and stress there was also great life and vibrancy.  Children argued, but they also showed affection and love to each other.  The rooms that rang with their shouts also rang with their laughter and joy.  Tears were quickly forgotten and made way for simple pleasures and forgiveness.  Where tension sometimes arose, it was surpassed by times of amazing sweetness.  It was painfully obvious to me that dealing with so many children had to be rough at times, but there were so many diamonds in that particular rough that one would be a fool to think of trading it in for a smoother, but poorer, lot.

There's a passage in the book of Psalms:

"Children too are a gift from the LORD, the fruit of the womb, a reward.  Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children born in one's youth.  Blessed are they whose quivers are full.  They will never be shamed contending with foes at the gate." -Psalm 127: 3-5

 That is the gift that our friends have.  And one day, when the chaos of having young children has passed, the blessing of having that many children, or perhaps even more, will still be there, remaining long after the last child has become a responsible and more self-sufficient adult.  Yes, there are different worries and stresses that come with adult children, but the particular madness of child-rearing, the sleepless nights, the constant need for correction, the ever-present chaos and continuous work that goes into imposing order on a group of children, all of these things are temporary compared to the lifelong--and indeed eternal--treasure of having played a role in the creation of so many precious souls.  And if one is quite blessed, one will know such love from and for those souls that all the hardship and travail of their formative years seem to be nothing when compared to the reward.

As the father of two children under the age of two, I know that in the short term and in the present, it can seem that it's not worth it at all.  There are times, in our own chaos, that I sincerely believe I'd be happier without any children, when I absolutely hate being a father.  So I can only imagine it's far harder with more children, at least depending on their ages (especially, I'm told, the age of the eldest).  However, when I look at how lasting the blessings are, and how ultimately temporary this part is, I know what I want:  When my children are all grown, the last diaper changed and the last teenage hormonal phase outgrown (well, okay, tentatively outgrown), I know I will never regret having had "too many," but--at least and especially if by choice--I know for a fact that I would regret having too few.

A large family is a blessing, and one that indeed God does not give to everyone.  My wife and I are always aware that, due to certain fertility issues that are inherent to her family, we may not reach that goal.  And even if we have a somewhat large family, its size may still fall somewhat short of my old dream, and the thought of surpassing the number from that dream is barely more than an outright pipe dream.  We will learn to deal with that cross of deprivation, should we come to bear it, with faith and trust, seeing the admitted bright sides of having a smaller family if it comes to that, but none of that negates that a full house is a blessed one.


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*Note:  "Serious reason" to avoid having [more] children, in the Catholic Church, is not something to be decided on lightly.  It must certainly be more serious than "I just don't want another child right now," and even more serious than the other "reasonable" standby in our materialistic, career-driven culture of "But I'm too poor to send each kid off to College!" In terms of mental and emotional reservations, there should probably be solid reason to believe that one literally cannot cope with having more children or that one seriously cannot provide for each child psychologically, emotionally, and/or spiritually if there were another added to the family.  Though it's not mandatory, these things are best determined with a spiritual director or a trusted expert at judging these things, or at the very least an outside objective party, because it's easy for us to deceive ourselves into taking the "easier" path when it's not necessarily warranted.  Reasons of physical health, it should be noted, are also perfectly valid reasons to use Natural Family Planning to avoid another pregnancy, obviously including those cases where the wife's body probably could hardly handle another pregnancy.

To Thyself Be True: The Get-out-of-Marriage-Free Card?

My wife recently came across an article which she passed my way on Facebook.  Being that she's married to a man with same-sex attractions, the article tells the story of my wife's worst fear:  The author--whom we're taking at her word strictly for the sake of argument, and if she's misrepresenting her spouse then the words that follow may not apply to him in particular--writes that her husband, after years of marriage and having fathered several children, decided to be "true to himself," and leave her for a man.  Having embraced an identity as "gay," he threw away everything he had built with his family in order to pursue that identity, an identity that we are told in our current cultural chaos must be fulfilled at all costs.  In his case, the cost was borne largely by the little ones and the wife, who weren't permitted any real say in this shattering of their family.   He was gay, and that was that.  According to the author, this same man fought for primary custody of the children, presumably won it, and forced the children to be part of his gay "wedding" even against their own reluctance to celebrate an event that, y'know, formalized the tearing apart of their family.

What do we make our children do next?
Tea parties in honor of the car that hit and killed a beloved pet?

The thing that was even sadder, however, is that a man like this husband often receives accolades and sympathy in our culture.  Keep in mind, I'm not saying that it's bad that people have sympathy for people who do wrong things.  But he's not merely receiving sympathy.  People like this man often are actively encouraged to break their vows in so permanent a way.  "It's okay," our society consoles them, "You have to be who you are!"  Actually, it's almost as insulting to people who are attracted to the same gender as it is to this man's wife:  Evidently, we are not real adults.  We don't have to be held to our promises.  When we make vows, we are evidently too stupid, or too scared, or too spineless to really know what we're getting ourselves into.  So then, when one day we want to leave our spouses to "be true" to ourselves, it's okay, because when we made the vows we just didn't "know any better."  Gee, thanks, culture.  I feel so supported.

Where did we go so terribly wrong?  The answer, sadly, is older than the gay marriage debate by decades.  We as a society began to accept the notion of no-fault divorce.  Not only did we legalize it, we began to condone it.  We began to accept that "Sometimes, it just doesn't work."  Sometimes, we argued, it was okay to break a solemn, lifelong vow for no other reason than just being unhappy with the arrangement.

What, though, is a vow even good for, if it's okay to break it at your own discretion?  The marriage vows generally contain some variation of "til death do us part," AND "for better or worse."  Those two sentiments have huge implications.  It means, when you marry someone, you are making a promise that not only will you remain spouses until one of  you dies, but also that you'll live up to this no matter how bad it gets.  Otherwise, it wouldn't be a variation on "for better or worse" but would be something more like "as long as times are good or I consider the hard times worth it."

A vow so touching it deserves its own Valentines Day card!

People have stopped thinking before they enter into marriage.  When a man (and all this would be true in the gender opposite scenario too) decides to leave his spouse, no matter how she wants to keep the marriage together, and his reasons are anything short of fear for his life and safety at the hands of real abuse,* then I see only three possibilities:

1.  He was lying about those vows, even as he made them.  This is despicable, and I don't need to say anything more about it.
2.  He hadn't really thought things through about what the vows meant before he made them.  The meaning of the vows are pretty obvious, though, so if he hadn't thought hard enough to grasp the meaning of "for better or worse," he had no business making the vows in the first place.
3.  He has "changed his mind."  This is about as despicable as the first one, because a vow means nothing if it's okay to just "change your mind" at a later point in time.

In all of these cases, the vow isn't being taken seriously.  The first man wasn't taking the vows seriously in the present.  The second man wasn't taking the future implications of the vows seriously.  And the third man isn't taking seriously a vow made in the past.  In all three cases, this is an enormous problem.  Vows, by definition, have to be taken seriously in all tenses:  Past, present and future.   And yet our no-fault divorce culture winks at a person who failed to take them seriously in any one of those tenses, or even all three.

If a woman can easily be excused for leaving her husband because "the feeling of love isn't there anymore," or a man can be excused for leaving his wife because he wasn't attracted to her anymore, then it was inevitable that eventually a man or woman could leave a spouse for someone of the same gender, and our culture would smile upon it as "doing what's necessary for your own happiness."

Yet the man or woman who breaks a marriage to enter a gay relationship is being praised with a deeper and more sinister irony than his heterosexual counterparts:  More so than any other person who leaves his or her spouse, the gay man who breaks faith with his wife is praised for being "honest," reportedly with himself and his spouse.  Let's get this straight (no pun intended):  A person who made vows that he either never took seriously or has ceased to take seriously, is praised for being "honest" for that very same fact.  Am I the only one who sees something wrong here?  The ultimate act of dishonesty--throwing a vow casually to the wind and no longer even trying to live up to it--is now called an act of honesty?!

You might wanna sit down while you
try to figure that one out.

If that's the sort of grace and mercy our culture has for men in my shoes, then I'll pass.  I don't need that brand of "love" or "tolerance."  It's insulting.  If the best way to be compassionate and loving to me is to teach me that my responsibilities aren't binding, and that the best way for me to be "honest" is by being profoundly dishonest about a solemn promise, then I want no part of that.  Besides, if that love and compassion are as unpredictable as society says my wedding vows are allowed to be, I'm not missing out on much anyway.


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*Note:  I'm not being inconsistent at this point in the post.  As a Catholic, I really do think a marriage vow covers "no matter how bad it gets" even including abuse, but that is one of the few scenarios where a person can be understood for physically separating and maybe even get a "civil divorce" for his or her own safety or that of the children; but even then the vow underlying the marriage still exists, if it was taken seriously:  Yes, that does mean that vowing "for better or worse" is so serious it borders on scary.  If you vow "for better or worse" or "to death do us part" or "forever" or "for life" or any other such thing and don't think it has such scary implications, or you think these plain and obvious words have some sort of hidden "escape" clause, then you haven't thought it through enough to be making the vow.