Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf

Jane: So, we have a bunch of kids. And sometimes, usually when something pleasantly mundane is happening — the little kids are building something and the big kids are reading their books and the baby is gurgling away and I’m making dinner, perhaps, or when we’re all bustling around packing lunches and practicing spelling words and chitchatting — I look around and think to myself, “Wow, this is so great. I’m so lucky to have all these awesome people in my house. Why don’t more people do this?”

There are, of course, downsides: I am typing this very slowly because one of my arms is full of a baby who doesn’t like to nap unless I’m holding him. You have to label the leftover lasagna you’re taking for lunch tomorrow or else someone will have it for a snack. I am staring down the barrel of at least another decade of the exact same Mother’s Day musical program at the kids’ school, and it would probably be rude if I started singing along. And there are days when we’re waiting around like Kurt Russell at the end of The Thing to see where the stomach bug will strike next. But come on, nobody doesn’t have kids because of the existence of norovirus.

So…why don’t more people do this? (Either having a bunch of kids or, increasingly, just having kids period.) I’ve heard a lot of theories: just recently and off the top of my head, I’ve been told that kids cost too much money, that kids don’t actually have to cost a lot of money but we have very high standards for our parenting, that there are too many fun things you can’t do anymore when you have kids, that having a lot of kids is low status, and that being a housewife (an increasingly sensible choice the more kids you have) is low status. And, of course, car seat mandates. There’s something to most of those theories, but they all boil down to one fundamental claim: we’ve built a world where having kids, and especially having a lot of kids, just…kind of sucks.

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