WSJ BLOGS / The Juggle
WSJ.com on choices and tradeoffs people make as they juggle work and family.
FEBRUARY 11, 2011, 9:19 AM ET
Life as a Working Mom of Four
By Demetria Gallegos
We just posted on comedian Tina Fey’s internal tug-of-war whether to have a second child as her career is hitting a peak. Here’s WSJ editor Demetria Gallego’s take on a different kind of juggle: being a working mother of four close-in-age daughters.
“Excuse me,” said the lady, stepping past me gingerly on a snow-packed New York curb.
“Excuse us,” I said reflexively, even though I was alone.
That’s just what a mother of four says. We have the collectivized brains of bumble bees. Our hive mind keeps our eyes sweeping the perimeter of any restaurant for forgotten pacifiers or glasses or iPods. It calculates our impact on any gathering — both the locust-like devastation of a buffet table that our family can wreak, and the peril of failing to RSVP. And it keeps us speaking in the first person plural.
I was the youngest of six, and I loved growing up in a chaotic, loud and exciting household. Even though my folks were far from rich and say my siblings and I were “born despite every form of birth control known to man,” they made it clear that having kids was the most fun they’d ever had. My older brothers and sisters each chose to have just two kids or fewer, but I always wanted more. Six did sound a bit excessive, so I thought five sounded quite modest by comparison.
My husband, who has just two siblings, took it in stride and immediately began looking for a large house in Colorado as soon as we were married. The first baby came and had us completely charmed, cooing and smiling at six months old. I was pregnant again before she began crawling and then as we began chasing her it occurred to me we were probably in trouble. We scaled back the plan to just four, and all turned out to be girls, now ages 14, 13, 11 and 9. We named the last one “Jewel” because we wanted her to know that we hadn’t just been trying for a boy all those times. She was EXACTLY the baby we wanted, our treasure.
Back when the girls were coming along, my husband made a spectacular deal in his home-based rare-book business and we got an even bigger house. Each girl had her own room, until this surprising new job opportunity as a Journal editor in New York City came along. Suddenly, I was hearing from brokers that there weren’t any four or five bedroom apartments in the neighborhoods we wanted. They just didn’t exist. And the more spacious apartments that did exist would break us. That was the first major reckoning about how our family might be too big for New York City. (Ultimately, all the girls doubled up so three bedrooms are doing the trick.)
While keeping up with four is a lot of work, the main reason things work well in our family is my husband. He’s a stay-at-home dad now and the most frugal man alive. He feeds us and packs our lunches. He takes on the laundry which was never fun, but now involves a laundromat a block away. He helps defray our rent by taking on the thankless job of building superintendent. He volunteers at school and eases my guilty working-mother conscience.
When my daughters were born, i took four maternity leaves in six years, but the leaves were generally the minimum six weeks and I tried to compensate by working some insanely long hours and never missing work for a sick kid or school complication. I stayed with that employer for ten years, and I think they got their money’s worth. I certainly might have risen higher in that newsroom with fewer kids, but one can never be sure. I am reassured to see that more professional women these days are opting for bigger families. If you can pull them off, they are more than worth it.
Still, we are paying dearly for the privilege of having a large family. According to Forbes, a college-educated woman loses about $1 million in lifetime earnings after having just one child. Which leads us to our next cruel big-family reckoning – paying for college. We have friends who spaced their two kids four years apart with all this in mind. We will have three enrolled at a time, possibly four if they go to grad school. What were we thinking?
We sometimes have to answer for our decision to have such a big family. No, we’re not deeply religious. But I often feel greedy. Are we putting an undue burden on the world’s resources? Are we being selfish? Are we just hedging our bets that they will care for us in old age? Or, if we get them all through college and they prove to be as hard-working and creative as we think, will they give something much larger back to our world?
We prefer to take the long view — past the financial hit of college or even another pair of braces to the pleasure of admiring their unique abilities and personalities. Or the eventual joy of getting them all re-assembled as adults with their own families for a holiday meal (or the odds that one or two of them might choose one day to live nearby. ) And we are grateful that our girls are healthy, devoted to each other and are still speaking to us even though two are now teens.
Author Elizabeth Stone once wrote that the decision to have a baby was “to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” Mine heads in four directions most days, and takes me places I could have never gone.
Readers, any of you have or grow up in large families? Would you like to? Or would it place too much stress on your juggle?
