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By Root 388 0

and me to long for what we called a “normal” family life. For us, normal meant being able to travel outside of the house with just the ten of us—no chaperones. Normal meant my kids could get out and play freely, instead of being restrained in their strollers because we couldn’t keep sixteen chubby little legs from running in eight different directions. In my fantasies about “normal,” I craved a quiet life where my family and I could go out in public without people staring, pointing, and counting my kids. It was hard enough trying to be a mom of twins and sextuplets without feeling like the world was watching everything I did.

Safety is always a concern for parents of young children, but for Jon and me, any usual concern had to be multiplied by eight. For example, what if our house caught fire during the night? That was one of my greatest fears. Physically, how would two adults get eight kids out of a burning house? Every night before I went to sleep, I prayed to God to keep us safe from a fire.

When the six were infants, the best plan Jon and I could come up with was for me to get Cara and Mady. Jon would then pile the little kids into one big blanket and throw it over his shoulder like Santa as we all raced to the nearest exit. We knew that wasn’t a perfect solution—the babies would roll all over each other, maybe even break a bone—but it was better than the alternative. We always kept a comforter under the cribs just in case of an emergency.

But once we were in a new house and the little kids were no longer infants, we had to come up with a new plan. Though they could walk, you can’t tell six two-year-olds, “Yeah, I know it’s hot and smoky, but go ahead and walk down the stairs.” No, they’d be terrified. We had to come up with contingencies for every possibility. “What if the fire is at the bottom of the steps?” “What if one of them runs back upstairs to grab a comfort item?” “What if they’re too scared to come to us when we call them?” Other families had fire drills; Jon and I had fire interrogations.

Another thought that kept us awake at night was who would take the kids if something happened to us. For many families, it’s easy to find an aunt, grandmother, or close friend to take in a child or two.

But eight kids?

It was important to Jon and me that the kids stayed together. Who would be willing and capable of taking all of them? My brother and sister-in-law offered, but they already had four kids of their own. It would be too much to have twelve kids in one house. Their intentions were admirable, and we were grateful for the offer. But twelve kids would send even me over the edge.

We struggled to find a solution. Eventually, we named our friends as the first choice to take the kids. We chose them because their kids were older, and we felt it wouldn’t be such a huge burden for them to take all eight. I trusted that they would make family visits a priority for our kids in the event that something happened to Jon and me.

House fires. Parents dying. Certainly those are extreme, unlikely events, but they are still normal concerns for most families. What wasn’t normal was how complicated it was to address those concerns. We could twist ourselves in knots over the right thing to do. It was never easy. The decisions we had to make seemed harder than those made by typical families, and I longed for the simplicity of an ordinary-sized household. In my fantasies these people’s lives seemed much less complicated than mine.

Ordinary parents cook pancakes, but most don’t quadruple the recipe. Ordinary families buy bread at the grocery store, but few of them buy it by the flat (that’s twelve loaves if you’re counting). Ordinary moms of two-year-olds run out of energy during the day, but I’m guessing they don’t usually feel entirely depleted. From the mundane (we ate four boxes of cereal or two dozen eggs for breakfast every day) to the unusual (on Christmas we put a baby gate around our tree to protect the ornaments from the kids and the kids from the ornaments) our normal was never ordinary.

Our culture just isn’t set