This article is from last year’s Globe and Mail (Friday, but still, last year). It’s sad that someone with a mere four kids would have to endure such rude commentary.
People asked, “Did you do fertility treatments?” When I said no, one person responded with, “So, this was on purpose?” Another man educated me on my carbon footprint: “Your overactive uterus is causing overpopulation.”
I feel annoyed on behalf of my friends who have families of four, or double that (or more than double that). I know they endure A LOT–of derision, snide remarks, and hostility. This article gives you a mere taste.
Amazing to think this is where we’ve landed: women were once outcasts for being “barren” and now they are outcasts for having kids. Will there never be a happy medium? Sigh.
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I once overheard someone say about a women in a shop with six children… “Apparently some people like to treat their uterus’ like a clown car.” Women with many children are seen as irresponsible and sometimes just ridiculous, and it’s a shame. The ability to have a large family is certainly a gift. Those women make motherhood look so easy, and I have to admit that sometimes I envy how gracefully the go about their lives when I’m fumbling with just two! 🙂
Women who have several children need support from others doing the same. While this is not always possible where one lives, that is one advantage of the internet. There are many bloggers who are having large families and they provide the much-needed support that these women need.
One response that these women should feel quite comfortable giving is that their children are reaping the benefits of having many siblings. Large families provide advantages for their members.
The other thing that really bothers me about this is why do people feel free to criticize those having many children, while it is completely prohibited to ask someone why they have no children?
Jennifer said: “I once overheard someone say about a women in a shop with six children… ‘Apparently some people like to treat their uterus’ like a clown car.'”
Obvious attempt at snide condescension aside, it’s a completely inept analogy – unless the person making it thinks a “clown car” is occasionally driven by half a dozen different clowns over a span of a decade or so.
You know, Scott, in the second those snide comments are made, I do wish I had the presence of mind to be able to say “Actually that doesn’t make any sense. Please work on your snide condescension and get back to me when you’ve honed your art.”
To be strong on the comeback when people are rude and ridiculous–that’s a goal I’ll have to work on.
I’ll bet that for many zygotes of otherwise childless women–the kind of women who make the clown car comment–there was found no womb as an inn. Either these “mothers” treat their uterus with “contraceptives,” or they treat it like a cell on death row (with or without pardons).