How Many Hamburgers?
by Ana Braga-Henebry in Family on Friday, September 25, 2009 6:00 AM
When we stopped one recent day in a picturesque Wisconsin small town for a quick lunch at the tail end of our summer vacation, our family ordered the usual astronomical number of burgers.
The young man on the other side of the counter made the expected comments on the size of our order, and I chatted for a bit with him about life with seven kids. He was a young dad, proud of his three small children, and I greatly enjoyed witnessing to him the joy and pride that are so much part of our family life.
I started in a very familiar way, telling him it is the arrival of that third child that propels the patterns of a large family: first and second children could, until that point, get much individualized attention from Mom and Dad. With Number Three the real sharing begins, I said, adding that after the third child it doesn’t really make much difference how many more come: chaos is in place for life. I said these things tongue-in-cheek, but there was love and a positive affirming of life in the tone of our conversation.
Memory of Mother
Our mini vacation had more to do with needed paperwork at the consulate general of Brazil in Chicago than with a traditional holiday per se, and since the paperwork was related to my late dear mother’s estate, I had her much in my thoughts and memories. As we climbed back into the family van and the miles stretched west towards the setting sun, I pondered on what mother must have gone through. Raising ten kids during an age when the advent of the Pill was hailed as the very salvation of woman from the slavery of old moral, obsolete rules, must have not been easy.
Being the seventh of ten children, much of my family’s memories are from the point of view of a young child. What I remember is what Mother would say to friends and family when all of us little ones were underfoot. We knew there were many of us, and by the exclamation of strangers we knew our numbers weren’t the norm. And yet I remember Mother’s smile, the loving pride she had to tell people she had all of us. This sort of memory, I firmly believe, becomes engraved in stone in a child’s heart, and it must be more beneficial to our successes, confidence and self-confidence in life than any self-esteem program.
A Pope and a Pill
Later in life, as a mother of a numerous offspring myself, I would have wonderful conversations with my dear Mother. I am so grateful we had those opportunities despite the fact that we lived in different countries: we made great use of our sporadic times together. We shared much with each other as I went through so many of the same things she experienced as she raised her young children.
Once during one of these conversations she told me how she and my father suffered terribly when Pope Paul VI formed the commission to study the Pill: it seemed to the world that the finding of the commission would be certainly pro-Pill, as indeed it passed to be, and that the Pope would change the Church’s millennia-old teachings.
My parents were jeered as “more Catholic than the pope” and Mother said those were tough, tough times. She told me when Humanae Vitae came out she and my dad cried like babies. Their tears must have been memorable: they felt consoled by a solid, unchanging Church, guided by the Holy Spirit, and I can only imagine the love and gratitude in their hearts that evening when they prayed at bedtime, all of their numerous children under their roof, their hope and trust in God renewed and rewarded.
When I tell fast food servers or perfect strangers in the grocery store about the fun we have at home with our large family, I may get a funny look or a semi-negative comment, but I immediately try to turn it into a life-affirming opportunity. All in all, I live in a world that is much more accepting of our family size and lifestyle than Mother had when she was raising her ten children. May God in His Infinite wisdom guide my witnessing to others, as His Kingdom is built!
—Ana Braga-Henebry has a Masters Degree in Humanities from the University of Texas at Dallas. She has written myriad articles for Catholic homeschool periodicals, has been writing book reviews for over ten years, and blogs from the family acreage in South Dakota.
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