Easy Sunday: A big Irish Catholic family

History may show that the most consequential invention of the 20th Century was the birth control pill and other forms of reliable contraception. 

Large families are rare in America now. It is now commonplace for young women in America to choose not to have children at all. The replacement rate for a stable population is an average of 2.1 children for each woman. The rate in the U.S. is now 1.62 births per woman, and the rate is going down. 

This has all happened in one lifetime.

Gerald Murphy is a retired high school English teacher and a playwright, with dozens of plays and musicals performed by schools, churches, and community theaters in over 40 countries. 

Guest Post by Gerald Murphy

Katty, Jerry, George, and Peggy are still alive.
Suzanne, Molly, Jim, Mom, Dad, and Joe are deceased

My big Irish Catholic family

I read somewhere that research and studies say that single unmarried women without children are happier than married women with children. I’m not a woman, so I won’t presume to know if this is true. It’s confusing to me. I could ask my mother, of course, since she had quite a bit of experience in this area. Unfortunately, my mother died over twenty years ago, so, I’ll never know the answer.

 

My mother had nine children, five boys and four girls. Was it hard to live in such a large family? I can’t think of any of the nine who would have complained. We lived in a tough neighborhood, but with four older brothers, I was untouchable. We did not suffer from want. My father had work from the early Depression until the day he died. My mother fed us well. 

 

We had acceptable sleeping arrangements, The sisters had one bedroom and slept in two double beds, two in each. The boys slept in bunk beds, with me in a ‘junior’ bed, until one of the older brothers left for the service. Then I got my coveted bunk. 

 

My parents followed the teachings of the Church against birth control, although they did try the “rhythm method,” obviously without success. My mother, who could be very blunt at times, thought the method was merely a cruel ruse to get her pregnant again and again. She did not like being forced into repeated pregnancies, but she felt she had little choice. 

 

My mother came from Ireland. She had three sisters, and they all immigrated to America. Two never married (and in those days, being single meant no children.) The other sister married in her early forties and had only one child, a girl. My mother knew that her sisters would never have traded places with her. Raising nine children was an insane burden, both physically and emotionally. Why would she choose this life unless there were no other choice because of her Catholic faith?

 

My mother never preached to us the value of having many kids. She was practical. Kids could be a blessing, but also a curse. When the abortion debates came to our family in the seventies, she often pointed out which one of us she would have chosen for abortion. She had a great sense of humor, so we all laughed this off. But she could also be red-faced with anger and say this with exceptional Irish vitriol.

 

In short, in another time my mother could have had a very different life. She could have waited for marriage and ended up with just one child. Or she could have avoided marriage altogether, ending up happily single, with nine purring kittens on her happy and relaxed lap. 

 

So, should my mother have produced nine children, or one, or none? The answer, I believe, is not for me to choose. If a woman knows what she wants, and is able to choose herself what she wants, then she might be happy with her choice. I don’t think it’s a wise thing to have outsiders, whether the Catholic Church or JD Vance, make the choice for you.

 

Today we live in a different world from my childhood. Catholics are far less likely to blindly follow the rules of the Church. Even in previously devout Ireland, the hold that the Church once held has greatly loosened, brought on by the sexual abuse scandals involving Catholic priests. 

 

Those, like Vance, who would have us return to the good old days have a tendency to hark back to an imagined state of grace, a happy “Leave It To Beaver” existence where Blacks and women and immigrants knew their place, where men went to work in the morning, the woman stayed home and cooked, and the biggest problem kids got into was chewing gum in class.  

But those were not the days I remember. My life was happy, then sad, then filled with success, then failure and everything in between. It was confusing when I was young; it is still confusing. I suspect Vance had just as much confusion in his life. But he’s in a position now to re-invent the past and possibly mold the future. That is a scary notion. If my mother were alive today, she might have something to say about Mr. Vance. “Faith and begorrah, we might all be better off if his mother had only aborted the wee darling.” 

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