Last month, my first-born child, Claude, graduated from the University of Michigan while my youngest child wrapped up her third semester in preschool. How we got here is a continuing journey embarked upon the day my first baby was born and one I plan to explore in this column.
Claude, Hugo, Jules, Leif, Lyra. Five children was not my plan. Zero was my original plan because my mother was poorly parented and she, in turn, parented poorly. I felt the only way to stop the cycle was to avoid parenting altogether.
However, in my late 20s, a tall charmer with chameleon eyes swept me off my feet. My opposition to having children evaporated. I agreed to birth two babies, thinking they could have each other, the sibling relationship being the longest in our lives, without adding to overpopulation.
However, when Hugo was 2, my husband began advocating for a third child. Of the many things he talked me into against my better judgment, I am forever grateful I capitulated on that third child. If you ever meet my Jules, you’ll quickly know why. Even his older brothers tell me Jules possesses their better characteristics without their foibles (Claude: studies and works hard, but socially reticent; Hugo: musical extrovert who rarely turns homework in on time, if at all).
For nine years, Jules was the baby of the family. When he was 7, I ended my marriage. A year later, my friend Max and I fell in love and, at age 44, I gave birth to my fourth son on the fourth of February.
Leif solidified our newly formed family, a whip-smart pistol whose existence not only biologically connects the boys to Max, but was also the best birth control you could give teenage boys. Living with a baby when you are in high school dispels any notion that child rearing is easy.
Being pregnant and giving birth was no different in my 40s than it had been in my 20s and 30s. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy. Which helped Max when he advocated for just one more, pointing out when Jules leaves for college, Leif will be just 9 years old. And so, at 46, I finally got my darling daughter, Lyra.
Love doesn’t describe what I feel for my children. It’s at once both bigger and more mundane. I recently learned that each time a woman has a baby, the child’s DNA injects itself into the mother’s cells, making the mother a chimera of herself and her children.
While I never planned to have five children, of course now I cannot imagine a life without them. I have raised my children how I wish I had been raised, which went a long way, along with lots of therapy, to healing me from my own childhood.
I invest in my children, which does not mean I helicopter parent. Quite the opposite, for my parenting mantra is push and lift, push and lift. I push them to work for their goals and help them find the means to do so. I sometimes miss the mark or completely fail (particularly with Hugo, who is often cited as the most like me), but mostly it has worked out, this parenting business.
The day after he graduated from high school, Claude got on a bus to his grandparents’ home in Charlevoix, Mich., where he worked for the streets department that summer. All their lives, he and his brothers have spent many weeks each summer in Charlevoix, but the day he left to work full time, I called my stepmother and, to my surprise, began heaving grief-filled sobs.
She listened and soothed, never telling me to stop. There were so many things I planned on doing with my chicks all in the nest, but suddenly they were fledging and it would never be the same.
No, it never is the same once they are grown. Yes, I remain their mother, they my children, but we are all adults and it is as adults that we interact. When they are all home, my sons tower over me, talking, laughing and arguing together. And each of these three young men regularly peels me off from the rest of the family to talk one-on-one, which I value more than any purchased gift.
Having two children the age of many of my high school classmates’ grandchildren has shown I am not the same parent at 50 as I was at 30. However, now I have Max, who went from zero to five children in four years. He does much of the heavy lifting in parenting the “littles,” revealing a large part of who Max is and how sad it would have been for him to miss out on being a dad. For even when we have step-parenting issues, and we do, the big boys never doubt Max’s fidelity.
We are family.
Contact Holly Christensen at whoopsiepiggle@gmail.com.