EPTShe had nine children; in the brief year I knew them back in elementary school they only had I think five or six, though I can't remember more than three faces. I only knew one of them even remotely: a kid maybe a little younger than me whom I always thought was named "Owen" even though he wasn't.
We might have gone to their house once for dinner on a Sunday night; I'm 80% sure they never came to ours. They were the first family I recall that stuck out in my mind as "odd", reclusive: now I would classify them, at least in the attitude I remember back then, as "more conservative than us", or even "fundamentalist", with many of the connotations that carries in Christian circles.
I've known several other families in the same mould since: the impression that's grown and stuck with me of these people is that the women are very quiet: the wives and mothers especially not apparently unhappy, most of the time, but stern, often projecting not the calm they seem to idealize but instead a sort of cultivated emotionlessness.
It seems to me a nearly unnatural way to live.
Also yesterday, I heard from my roommate that his brother's wife had miscarried. This is equally tragic, in its own different way - but again I had to fight not to find it horrendous. Apparently she has miscarried three times: they have no living children that I know of. And my instinctive reaction is to ask whether, at some point, you have to stop trying. To at least visit a doctor, and find out if there are medical issues here. If you need children - adopt?
My own aunt and uncle had a miscarriage: as far as I know they never tried again, but they work with students and other younger people in their free time. I have friends, who had five children. They are wonderful people, and love their kids, and might have had more, but when the doctor said it was dangerous - they adopted, instead.
There is immense pressure within some circles, of the Christian church but maybe elsewhere, for married people to have kids - and for unmarried people to marry. I'm no one's idea of a hyper-feminist: I'm a fairly conservative Christian myself; I think abortion is wrong; the chivalric instincts of my upbringing still create a knee-jerk reaction that makes me uncomfortable with certain ideas, say that of women in the military. In the abstract: I have good friends in the military, both men and women, and no problem with either. I've never found any sustainable argument (even from the Bible) to back up the feeling, and it's not a point I would ever argue for: I am simply trying to illustrate my own background here.
But I've become more and more uncomfortable with this emphasis over the years. It's not entirely unnatural, of course: the reproductive instinct is not something we can overlook. And philosophically, in some ways it's simply a reaction, I think, to the excesses of some feminists who have all but proclaimed all mothers to be slaves and all marriage unnatural. In other ways - speaking here distinctly as a Christian - it's indicative of the perpetual problem of trying to get by your own efforts what is promised as a gift and blessing that you actually have minimal control over. There are worse problems than this particular semi-obsession, but at the same time I wonder and worry about the stress it seems to put particularly on the women in these families, both mothers expected to produce, and daughters being raised with this as their ideal.
Because the simple fact is that not everyone can fit exactly the same model - even if this one does make some people happy. I remember one evening with another family of the same sort when a girl was sent to her room briefly during dinner, I think for something ridiculous like not closing her eyes when her father was praying. Now, while most of the family is more or less comfortably following this "fundie" model, she's moved herself back into a much less "sterile", environment: accepted and embraced what seems to me a fuller way of doing things, and I can't help thinking it's a good thing. Maybe it works for her mother and sisters, but I can't see her fitting in: I don't see how this particular girl would have the emotional room to deal with the stress.
So this is why I wasn't surprised... which still seems like a terrible thing to think. I don't mean I would have ever expected it, or even that I find it in some weird way rational. It's just that I have thought for a while now that the way of living these people do has to be hard, unnecessarily, demandingly, emotionally hard: getting rid of that, even in this most drastic way, seems, not good, not right - but understandable.
But it also leaves me dealing with the question of what, if anything, I take from it myself. I feel silly talking about these things: I've never been in a tough enough situation to come close to even contemplating suicide - the closest I've gotten is a vague intellectual curiosity as to the actual experience, but it's not one I propose to experiment with. I'm not married, don't have kids - I can't really relate there either. And of course I could be off-base with my observations, or the incident could have nothing to do with these pressures even if they are real. But it's one more piece of evidence, one more bit of knowledge gained from life, to file away and factor in to my attitudes and philosophy going forward. I'm just not sure what the conclusion is.
