What A Woman Can Do
I keep meaning to mention this. I met a woman at Michael’s xmas office party that was telling me a story about her grandmother. The woman had 22 children, all normal births, I believe. But, the really fascinating thing about that (like 22 pregnancies, labors and births is not fascinating enough), out of the 22 kids, there were TWO sets of triplets and THREE sets of twins!!! Almost half of her children were multiples!! No fertility drugs whatsoever, these multiples were all natural and vaginally birthed!
Now, I could not help but ask her, after her first set of triplets, wouldn’t you want to not have any more children? I mean, you would think it would be very taxing on your body to carry 3 people in there. I guess that made having a single baby a piece of cake! I could not imagine taking care of 2 or three infants at one time and dealing with the older kids, too and being pregnant! I asked if she had help and she said no, just when the older kids got old enough to help her raise the younger ones. She was married to the same man for all the kids. I swear, I would have asked him to get fixed or never have sex again. I honestly can’t imagine that many pregnancies and births and dealing with infants and toddlers and all the stuff you have to deal with. You would think she would have figured out her cycle to avoid pregnancy and wouldn’t she be so tired anyway from dealing with all of those kids to keep procreating??!!
How can they afford 22 children, anyway? Where would they all sleep?? How did anyone get enough (or any) attention from mom? I had so many questions for her, I didn’t want to ask too many at once but she could tell I was fascinated by the story!
I did ask if her belly and boobs were hanging down to the ground from being stretched out so many times and she said actually, she’s a pretty small person all over. I think she said she was 4′11″!!! That is truly amazing! She told me she went to a family reunion recently and she has like 200 first cousins, some she just met for the first time!
I guess some women are cut out to do this in their lifetimes. Clearly, I’m not one of them 
It is truly amazing to me what the female body is capable of doing.
January 21 2008 10:04 pm | birth and feminism and parenting
