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Is It Really Possible to Be a Good Mom When You Have Too Many Kids?
Sometimes we are just too close and too isolated to see the truth about the job we are doing.
I had too many children.
Each one was longed for, dreamt about, and planned long before they arrived in my womb. Each one felt known to me in such a tangible way I never felt like there was any option other than to allow them to be born. I feared I couldn’t love them enough, that my heart wouldn’t be able to grow fast enough to match the swelling of my belly, but that was never a problem. The problem was I didn’t know the right questions to ask, so I never faced the reality of how one woman could have enough time and energy to care for and raise four people the way I wanted to.
Now I realize that it just isn’t possible.
There are many things that have changed in the way I parent between the first and the fourth child, many things that seemed so important and caused so much stress that now I smile at when I see others driving themselves crazy. Food is a big one. By number four you learn to look at a child’s diet over the course of a week rather than one single day. They are picky and have unpredictable moods around what they will and won’t eat. They have so little they can control in their lives, it…
