Life With Six Children

This is supposed to be my monthly update, but I am going to continue on with a post I was already working on about having so many children. I've really been a basket case lately. Very sad all the time, overwhelmed with nostalgia, fear, anxiety. I suppose some of it can be laid on seasonal mood disorder, which has really begun to effect me in recent years, and some of it on the circumstance that I haven't felt that great since December when I had my kidney stone, but in truth a great deal of it is because I am really very happy, and I am suddenly overcome with terror that it is slipping away and that all these disasters are going to befall me, mostly financial in origin, but also now health-wise, that are going to rob me of my happy life with my children. Of course to some extent I have always felt this way. Looking back at 2005, or 2006 when I started this blog, I thought myself fairly plagued by misery, yet now I think of those years as an impossibly happy and simple time, the golden years of my life. But I was very fearful of the future then as well, I never imagined I would have made it to at least 2018 without some catastrophe befalling me from which I would not be able to recover.


Part of this melancholy is tied up with my second son's finishing 8th grade this year. 8th grade seems to be a big milestone for me, I was also quite overwrought two years ago when my oldest son finished that year. Of course I am deeply moved at seeing them grow up, and also these schools, and paying for them, consume so much of your energy, they become your whole life almost. But I still have four more children to go, including a just-turned-three-year-old who hasn't started preschool yet. My life is hardly over. But the older ones do take me back to when I was younger and more energetic, and it's sad to see them get big. They are very unsentimental about these things themselves though. For people who only have one or two children, every grade they complete, every sport they finish playing or toy they outgrow, that's it, the end, forever. It must be unbearable. Or maybe they have ordinary adult lives and hobbies to return to or continue with. I really don't after 15 years of having babies in the house.


I am even sad that technological changes have made the tapes and DVDs that my older children watched obsolete. The younger ones watch everything through streaming.


One downside of having six children without being extremely wealthy is that I am probably not going to be able to leave them very much, and since I had them mostly later in life, I will likely die when the younger ones are still in their 30s and 40s at best. So they'll be on their own, which in today's world is a scary prospect. However, I still do believe, largely because I have to, that our culture and economic arrangements are going to improve from the near-dystopia that they are today. I would feel guilty about having brought them into the world only to doom them to a wretched, hopeless existence. But I don't think they feel that way yet, or have occasion to, though neither do I and I often do anyway.


When I hear people saying they don't want to have any children because of concern for the environment I think that they must really be hammering this into people's brains in college, and that it's too bad. The world, or at least my part of it, desperately needs young people, especially smart ones. The rapid aging of the population while the number of people under 30 or even 40 continues to shrink is really becoming visible in New England. My children and their sports and activities are probably keeping me from descending into total existential despair.


I could write so many more things here, and maybe I will sometime, but I determined that when I reached my time limit, I would publish what I have, so here it is.