You All Knew It

I'm crazy.

At least, that's what the Today show tells me. Why else would I want more of these?

And these:

And this:

Yup. Crazy.

I usually turn some morning show on in order to catch the news brief so I know if anything exploded overnight and who got elected, that sort of thing. Their "lifestyle" pieces, having nothing whatever to do with my life, I generally ignore.

This morning, however, I happened to catch the teaser question "Why are couples choosing to have more kids?" I was mildly interested and left the TV on for the segment, expecting the answer to be, more or less, "because they can!" The answer they gave?

Because women are crazy.

They couched it in slightly nicer (only slightly) language, of course; they talked about how society values pregnancy and how women enjoy the "adulation" they get while they're pregnant. They talked about women being "bumpaholics" - addicted to pregnancy - and one (presumably childless and sane) psychologist compared women who want more children to the black-widow alien she-devil in the movie Species. (This is the alien who, upon finding out that the guy she chose to father her alien children was a diabetic, thrust a spike through his skull and walked on, unconcerned, to the next bar to find another guy.)

And the kicker? Guess how many children it takes for a woman to be nuts?

Two is apparently ok, but if you want three or four kids, your husband better just watch out that he doesn't develop diabetes.

The interviewer feebly tried to suggest that surely, this sort of mad pregnancy-desire psychosis was rare?

"I don't know how rare it is," replied the psychologist. "Women need to understand why they're getting pregnant before they get pregnant."

Gosh, maybe the reason a woman is getting pregnant is because she wants a baby?

I was more shocked and appalled than I should be, I suppose; it just struck me as odd to hear four children described as a "big" family. After all, I peresonally know families that have five, seven, and eight kids respectively; through the internet, I'm familiar with famlies that have ten or more children. To my mind, a family starts being big when you have to buy the nine-passenger van to get to church. Three or four kids are just...well, average.

But that wasn't what appalled me. I shouldn't be surprised, in a country that murders thousands of unborn babies every month, that we devalue children to the extent that people who happen to like a lot of them must necessarily be less sane than people who spend their money on, say, Van Goghs or Lexuses. (Lexi?) It is appalling, however, to see the distain for children so blatantly displayed on national television--to see that it doesn't expect to be rebuked or even noticed very much.

I'm not one to say that, in the Catholic phrase, a Christian has to be "open to life in all instances". I think limiting your family, with non-abortificant contraceptives, is perfectly acceptable Biblically. (That's another blog.) However, if a couple is convicted that they should never use contraceptives, God forbid that I should tell them they need to. God will choose to bless some folks and not others with lots of kids; some folks are called to have lots of kids and some aren't. But since I don't know everything and can't read anybody's mind, I can never say with certainty whether someone is having kids in response to a call from God, because they just like babies, or because they are a "bumpaholic". Frankly, I don't think it's any of my business.

However, when we as a society define "more than two kids" as "crazy", even if we're not actively imposing limits on the number of children a couple may have, like China, we're imposing significant social sanctions on people who have three or more children. Nobody wants to be treated as though they're crazy.

As for the supposed adulation of women who are pregnant, I never experienced that during my pregnancies. Pregnancy for me is a means, not an end; anyone who thinks that the occasional stranger saying "Boy, you must be ready to pop!" is attention enough to compensate for swollen feet, having to pee every half hour, and throwing up each morning has never been pregnant. The reason women put up with being pregnant is that we want a baby. What's so pathological about that?

The psychologist ended the interview by saying, "Of course, I would never tell anyone what the right number of children is for a family to have. Whether to have another baby should be a family decision."

Well, madam, it always HAS BEEN. And since I'm crazy (I want two more kids, eventually), maybe you ought to refrain from telling me what to do.

Vive la crazies,

Breanna