Babies are Beautiful.

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:eek: What the heck happened to this thread? It was going rather peacefully still when I checked early this morning!

I can’t say much as I don’t have living children. But I will say that we are probably considered the worst of the worst as we have no (living) children and are currently using NFP to avoid indefinitely. We did get a confirmation from a devout priest that we have an ok reason to avoid. So I go with that and try to ignore all the LOOKS, snide remarks and whispers behind my back. 🤷
 
Convert_in_99 said:
:eek: What the heck happened to this thread? It was going rather peacefully still when I checked early this morning!

I can’t say much as I don’t have living children. But I will say that we are probably considered the worst of the worst as we have no (living) children and are currently using NFP to avoid indefinitely. We did get a confirmation from a devout priest that we have an ok reason to avoid. So I go with that and try to ignore all the LOOKS, snide remarks and whispers behind my back. 🤷
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I’m sorry you are going through that, Convert 😦
 
Xantippe said:
Actually, the OP does have more or less that attitude.

And haven’t we all bumped into the guy (or gal) on CAF that jumps into every single blessed NFP thread to make sure that the OP has “serious reasons”? I saw one of those just this morning.
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Since when does anyone save the couple and their priest have any right to make a secondary judgement? I do think many couples forget to consult a priest these days before making big decisions. But as long as they had a priest to help judge whether or not their reason is serious for them, then what business have we in second guessing a priest? And who knows who has been to a priest and who hasn’t. Careful when you judge a couple’s reasons for using NFP as you may in fact be second guessing a priest! 👍
 
bitterhope said:
Once again, way too much information and missing the point. No where did I say you had every handed to you. I said that discrimination is something you might not be accustomed to see discrimination because you haven’t had to face it. You don’t recognize that discrimination is set up to dissuade people from not confirming to societies ideals. That is the purpose of those laws. If we allow the world to make laws that purposely restrict a specific group of people, that is wrong.
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No, I don’t know about discrimination.

But I do know a lot about what the consequences can be when parents take on more than they can handle and what happens to family relationships when mom is spread too thin, is in way over her head and starts to crack. (Apologies for all the metaphors!)

My parents argued A LOT about money when I was a kid (at least every single week, I think, often long into the night after kids had gone to bed). My relationship with my mom took a long time to recover from the stuff she did in the mid-80s when she was trying to beat us kids into helping around the house. Also, the bad example my parents set to me with their marriage is something that I’m just now starting to realize the damaging effects of in my own marriage.

Now that I’m all grown up and I have a family the same age my mom’s was at the time, I have a lot more compassion for my mom with regard to the lack of resources she had and the demands on her at the time (three kids, picky husband, no money, unfinished house, living way out in the country, etc).

One of the things I’ve learned from my childhood is that it is possible to go too far, too take on more than you can handle, and to thereby do long-term damage to relationships. It also need not be irreparable–but that’s not a road I want to go down myself.
 
I’m sorry for the abuse you suffered. Your mother had poor coping skills and made and/or went along with bad choices. Lots of moms have had it much worse and not treated their kids poorly. That is not your fault. I highly doubt any of that would have been different with a different number of kids. If you had been an only child things still would have been bad. Projecting these bad experiences and the emotions caused by them is a normal reaction. I’ll be praying for healing for you. Big families aren’t any more likely to experience those problems. The discrimination needs to stop. The defending the size of my family because others might not like it and might possibly judge me is human nature and honestly immature. People do silly things like that all the time. There is a difference between people feeling the need to criticize and people being held back. Parents are responsible for their own actions and their own decisions. Kids aren’t supposed to be put in the middle of that.
 
Lou2U said:
Do your brother and sister really encourage others to have children? This sounds incredibly invasive to me. It is none of their business as to why a couple are not having children, and they should not be encouraging people to conceive just because they are “good upstanding Catholics”. Imagine if they said this to a couple unable to have children - how would the couple feel? It isn’t their job to say “we are unable to have children”, it is your siblings’ job not to ask.Lou
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I can let you know. The couple will feel lousy. It will bring everything back to the forefront. And although the couple will think they are handling it well, they will realize that they aren’t.

What’s worse is that it really isn’t anyone’s business. And the topic should have never been brought up.
 
Anglewannabe said:
I have trouble believing countless people have thanked you. I suspect perhaps people with 1 or 2 kids have thanked you, I seriously doubt several mom’s with 9+ kids have thanked you. And I also suspect that you are not telling us about off the people who have told you where to go
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Are you Catholic?
 
Guys, you’re reading way too much into my thread. It was never meant to be a definitive treatise on the sacrament of marriage. This was a simplistic thread on a beautiful reality. And the reality is Jesus wants us open to life, and of course this is a Catholic thread, and if there are extraordinary circumstances, it goes without saying one can use NFP. We are Catholics.

But I believe the underlying hostility is way way disproportionate to what was posted.

Here are the themes:
  1. I was blessed to exist.
  2. God is happy with other peoples existence.
  3. God wants people to be fruitful and multiply.
Why the ire on this simple post? I posted this out of love, not out of self righteousness, or ego. It was never meant to be the Suma, or Thomas Aquinas’ great work. It is strange.

Take it simply, as it is. I love children, and would love to see more in church.

Pax.
 
bitterhope said:
I’m sorry for the abuse you suffered. Your mother had poor coping skills and made and/or went along with bad choices. Lots of moms have had it much worse and not treated their kids poorly. That is not your fault. I highly doubt any of that would have been different with a different number of kids. If you had been an only child things still would have been bad. Projecting these bad experiences and the emotions caused by them is a normal reaction. I’ll be praying for healing for you. Big families aren’t any more likely to experience those problems. The discrimination needs to stop. The defending the size of my family because others might not like it and might possibly judge me is human nature and honestly immature. People do silly things like that all the time. There is a difference between people feeling the need to criticize and people being held back. Parents are responsible for their own actions and their own decisions. Kids aren’t supposed to be put in the middle of that.
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Now that I’m older, I see that my parents added on three major stressors at the same time.
  1. new baby
  2. unfinished house
  3. moving out into the country from town
It was too much for our particular family. I suspect that any two might have been OK, but all three of them together were more than my particular mom could handle.

I have a lot of happy memories of my mom from before that time (she was actually a fantastic mother of two in a rental in town), and lots of happy memories after that, but not a lot of which include my mom. Now that I’m older and have a family in a very similar configuration (two school age and a toddler), a lot of things are clearer. For instance, why did my grades plummet in 4th grade (and to a lesser extent in 5th grade) and then recover in 6th grade? It’s only in the last year that I realized, that 4th grade was the year after my brother was born and we moved out to the unfinished house in the country. Presumably, my schoolwork and grades were very low on the priority list the year that we started out cooking canned chili dinners on a hotplate in a house with no beds and lit with trouble lights…

(And a lot of the home-building process was very fun to be around as a kid, but the whole thing killed my relationship with my mom for years afterward.)

Some women would do better under the same circumstances, but it’s just as true that some women would do a lot worse. (At the time, I was very conscious that many of my classmates’ parents were WAY worse.) I have no illusions that I would have done better under the same circumstances. As Clint Eastwood says in Dirty Harry, a man’s gotta know his limitations. And that goes double for women.
 
maryjk said:
I have to agree.
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I suspect this was Facebook or similar, so not real life.

Also, I have to add that I think there may be an issue of perspective based on birth order. I see, for instance, that TheFraggle is one of the younger children. An older child in the same family might have a very different perspective than a younger child. I’ve told the story before on CAF, but in my extended family, my grandma’s oldest sister (the oldest of 8) was so burnt out by the large family experience that she very pointedly had just one and was miffed when her middle-aged professional son and his wife had a second child because it was cheating the older child.

I know that when my youngest sibling was born, there was a sudden expansion of my chore list while at the same time my mom kind of vanished from our life, and that no doubt contributed to a lot of conflict between my mom us two older kids. There was suddenly a lot less good fun mom stuff and a lot more do this do that and breaking kitchen implements on us. (I think there was some spanking when we lived in town, but it only really got epic and CPS-worthy during the country/new baby years.)

I went through something similar with my two big kids starting during my last pregnancy (minus the spoon breaking) with there being a need to get the two big kids to do more to help out, but I’ve been trying to work very consciously to do my best to preserve my relationship with my two older kids and not nuke the relationship the way my mom accidentally did. So far, so good, but Lord only knows if I could manage the same with a fourth right now. The big kids have been very good older siblings and obviously LOVE the baby but I suspect they would find a repeat younger sibling less enchanting especially while the current younger sister is at a taxing age. It’s a miracle they put up with as much from her as they do.

Also, I think Little House on the Prairie has a lot to answer for.
 
I agree. And if a couple feels the need to use NFP it is not up to me or anyone else, therefore please don’t make it anyone’s business by sharing those reasons. Grow a thicker skin and not let judgmental people bother you. Whatever size your family is, learn good coping skills and don’t put your kids in the middle of your fights. And don’t assume bigger families are looking down on you simply for not having tons of kids.
 
One must remember also that the Nuva Ring, The Patch, and all hormonal based contraceptives cause abortions.
 
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