"Wow, you have four brothers and sisters? That must be hard for you to have a new baby in the house again," a well-meaning lady in her 50s once commented to my daughter.

Knowing what response was expected of her and not liking to contradict adults, my 9-year-old lowered her head and quietly said, "Actually, I like having babies because they're cute."

"Oh!" the woman sputtered, surprised at my daughter's answer. "Well... that's good, I suppose. You certainly have enough of them!"

I have five children, and that makes my family an object of interest to pretty much everyone. Some of the comments we get are positive, but under many of them there's an underlying assumption.

People assume my kids are somehow not getting their needs met.

They think because we have five children, my husband and I must not have time for each of them. It's part of a larger double standard for big families. If you don't have a large family you probably have no idea what I'm talking about, but if you have a bunch of kids, you probably understand perfectly.

If you have two kids and one has yogurt smeared on her face and throws a tantrum in the produce aisle, she's just being a kid. Yet if the yogurt-covered tantrum- thrower has four or five siblings standing by, strangers judge more harshly. "Aha!" they will say, "Those people have too many children to handle!"

If a mother works full-time outside the house and has two kids, no one bats an eye. But if a mother like myself stays home with her five kids, strangers assume they're all starved for love and attention - despite the fact that I spend all day, every day with them.

There's something about big families that makes many people unwilling to assume the best, and all too ready to assume the worst.

My fifth baby was a preemie, struggling to breathe and eat on his own at birth and then lagging behind in almost all his developmental milestones after that. When other kids his age were crawling from point A to point B (and some overachieving babies were even walking), he was lying on his back and using his feet to push himself around.

"Is he still getting physical therapy?" a casual acquaintance asked, watching him scoot across the floor.

"Yes. He's coming along slowly. Verrrrrrry slowly," I laughed.

"Well, you do have five kids, so it's not like you have a lot of time to work with him."

I was a little shocked and didn't really know what to say. Why was this person I hardly knew suggesting that I didn't have time to love my son and nurture his development?

Obviously life is busy in a family of seven, but is it so different in a family of three or four? I'm not sure that people with one or two children feel like they're rolling in leisure time, either.

Many parents I know have to juggle working part-time, or even full-time along with the needs of their kids. I don't know how they do that. But they can, and they also manage to raise happy, well-adjusted children.

So I don't see why it's so hard to imagine that the parents of five (or 10 or 15, for that matter) can't do the same. We all have demands on our time.

I know people who grew up in small families who feel their parents were too busy for them, and others who grew up feeling very loved in their big family. What I'm getting at is you can't tell what kind of family someone has just by doing a head count.

That particular conversation is over, and I'm sure that woman never gave a second thought to her offhand comment.

But if I could go back in time, this is what I would say to her:

"I think I know where you're coming from. After all, when we all pile out of our van at the grocery store it reminds you of a clown car.

To you, my family looks like a nameless, faceless horde of children in the parking lot.

But don't assume it looks like that to me.

I know and love each of my children. I pray for them by name. Seeing every one of them achieve their full potential is the most important thing I'll ever do in this lifetime."

I see each one of them so individually that, to be honest, I'm sometimes a little taken aback when I look at a picture of our family all in a group and realize: That is a lot of people!

I don't see a big mass of kids when I look at our family in real life. I just don't.

I may not have time to do elaborate crafts at home or be president of the PTA, but my kids don't care about those things anyway. What matters to them is that I enjoy being with them, that I care to know all about them and that I love them.

And love doesn't work like pie, meaning the more people at the table, the smaller the slice.

I'm not a perfect mom, but I wouldn't be that even if I'd stopped at one or two children either. I'm just a good mom. And I'm enough for my kids.

Every single one of them.

This article was originally published on Jenny Evan's personal blog, Unremarkable Files.

The post Yes, I have five kids. No, I’m not neglecting any of them appeared first on FamilyToday.

"I just feel free now."

"How's that?" my husband asked. He was visiting a casual acquaintance we'll call Brian. Brian used to go to our church, but we hadn't seen him there for a long time.

"Let me tell you a story," Brian said, leaning forward in his seat. "You know where I was last Sunday? I was out canoeing on the lake with my girlfriend. The sun was sparkling off the water and then this big heron just flew right over us. I've never felt so peaceful and happy in my life. Church isn't for me."

He's not alone.

More than a third of Americans describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. Their churches aren't brick-and-mortar structures but the world God created.

They worship on the hiking trail and on the golf course, in the yoga studio and at the soup kitchen. They believe in fostering a personal relationship with God and don't see how stepping inside a church would help them do that.

I respect that way of thinking, except ... maybe belonging to a church is about more than just what you get out of it.

A long time ago, Moses and the Israelites were attacked while wandering around in the wilderness outside the Promised Land. Moses chose some men to defend them and said he'd stand at the top of the hill holding up his arms during the battle.

As long as he held his hands up, the Israelites prevailed.

But when he put them down, they started to lose.

So Moses held his arms up for as long as he could, but after a while the inevitable happened: It was a long day, and they grew too heavy. That's when two other men who were there with him stepped in.

"They took a stone and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun" (Exodus 17:12).

Luckily for Moses and the Israelites, churches are communities of people. They're more than buildings; they're networks for giving help and receiving it.

Sometimes you'll be Moses, overwhelmed and shaking as you try to hold up a burden that's too heavy. Sometimes you'll be the able-bodied friends at his side. Whoever you are at any given moment, you're always needed.

Can you worship God out on the lake as well as you can in a pew at church? Can you still feel His presence in the waves and the wind if you're not in a Sunday service? Absolutely. But you'll be missing out on a big part of what it means to be a believer.

There are people in your religious community right now struggling with illness, exhaustion, depression or crises of faith who need you. And even if you don't know it, you probably need them, too.

So is church for you? Well, it is and it isn't.

Church is a place you can go to get strength, but it's also a place to give it. Moses was part of a community of believers who (literally) supported him when things got too hard, and that's not so different from the way things are - or at least the way things should be - in our churches today.

Whether you're more like Moses or more like his friends, one thing is clear: if you're not there, it's everyone's loss.

This article was originally published on Unremarkable Files. It has been republished here with permission.

The post Maybe church isn’t for you appeared first on FamilyToday.

Dear Second-Time Mom,

It's totally overwhelming. You haven't showered in days. You're exhausted, and you smell faintly of sour milk and both kids are crying. If they aren't now, they will be soon.

How can one person be expected to do this?

You were probably a great mom the first time around. You learned on the fly how to manage diaper blowouts in public, and what's the fastest way to clean up after the baby spits up in your bra. You balanced learning time with playtime and took your first to all sorts of places. You didn't feel like you got it all perfect, but you did your best and felt good enough.

I was that mom, too.

When my first daughter came along I was full of energy and excitement about it. She was my little buddy, going everywhere with me from day one. It was like I'd been born to do this.

We were just as excited to add to our little family a few years later, when daughter #2 came along. I brought her home from the hospital with no idea what I was getting myself into.

I'm not even exaggerating when I tell you I cried every day for the first 6 months.

It wasn't at all like it had been the first time around.

When my first baby was born, we spent the better part of the next few weeks swaying back and forth in our cream-colored nursing glider. I didn't know what time it was and didn't really care. I probably spent hours a day just stroking her hair and breathing in that new-baby smell and memorizing the grunts and sounds she made while she nursed. (I also remember dusting sandwich crumbs off her head so I must've been eating at the same time.)

Bringing home my second baby couldn't have been more different.

I didn't even have time to glance at her while she nursed, other than to make sure she latched on correctly. I was running around doing everything one-handed: trying to read to my toddler, trying to get my toddler a snack, trying to clean up the crusty dishes from breakfast when I still hadn't eaten lunch yet (no sandwiches for me!). We rarely sat in the nursing glider except in the dead of night, because there wasn't room for my toddler to squeeze in next to us without elbowing me in the stomach or her sister in the head.

After a week of being home I looked down at my second-born nursing and thought, "Who is this little person?" I felt like I didn't know her at all. I was too busy trying to survive.

And it wasn't just that I felt disconnected from the baby. I was letting my toddler down, too.

Going out was hard because it seemed like both girls were only awake at the same time for a grand total of 20 minutes per day. While the baby ate and slept, my toddler and I spent most of our waking hours sitting in the apartment killing time. She was getting seriously tired of the game "Do you want to help me get a diaper for your sister?"

I told her "not right now" all the time now, a phrase I'd tried to avoid before unless absolutely necessary. Only it was always necessary now, because I was forever trying to get the baby to sleep, dealing with a nuclear diaper explosion, giving her a bath, or any of the other bajillion things a baby needs during the day.

Every time I did something for the baby, I was failing the toddler. Every time I did something with the toddler, I was failing the baby.

In short, I was a failure. I had no clue how to continue being the same kind of mom to two kids that I'd been to one. In fact, it was impossible. My time and attention had been sliced in half.

It wasn't until several months later that I happened to watch my oldest plop down nose-to-nose on the baby blanket on the floor next to her baby sister and just lay there, smiling like Princess Ariel had personally come over to sing "Part of Your World" for her. And her sister, too young to smile back, craned her neck to watch her with the most intense concentration I've ever seen.

I knew then that it was going to be okay.

I'd thought I was doing such a terrible job because I wasn't giving either of my girls what I thought a mom should be able to give her child. And to an extent, I was right - I had given up the ability to focus on each one 100% all of the time.

But I'd also given them each other. No matter how awesome a mom I'd been, I couldn't ever have given either of them that moment by myself.

From there on out, it was still hard, but it got better.

After a hectic trip to the store the baby sat fussing in her car seat in the living room, and without a word my toddler pulled over her plastic lawn chair and started "reading" to her out of a Miss Spider picture book with words she made up.

The baby grew older and I noticed that she reserved her biggest belly laughs for her sister. My toddler couldn't wait to get her up from naps and play with her, even when the baby was too little to do much of anything besides sit on a blanket and watch her every move.

My toddler thought the baby was the best thing ever, and the baby was equally enamored with her. They were in love.

My two daughters are 9 and 11 now, and the best gift I ever gave them is each other. Of course they bicker and get on each other's nerves like siblings do, but they're best friends for life.

Things won't always be easy, but you'll get better at multitasking and trust me: it's going to be more than okay.

Sincerely,

Another mom

This article was originally published on UnremarkableFiles.com. It has been republished here with permission.

The post Dear second-time mom who feels like she’s drowning appeared first on FamilyToday.