We raise five children

We had five children in nine years, two girls and three boys. They have been a revelation to me. My husband and I are constantly amazed and gratified by the lives they live, their talents, the people they married, and the way they are raising their children. I don't know how we were so lucky, but we are.

I remember the years we spent with little children and no money as full of sunshine and hard work, swimming and canoeing in the pond, sliding down the ditches in the hot sun, setting up tents under the trees in the back yard, hoeing in the garden, canning hundreds of jars of tomatoes and beans and grape juice and jam. I knitted and sewed and quilted and wrote in my journal and played with my beautiful babies.

Twenty five years after my last baby was born, I don't have as much time any more, even though my children have grown up and gone. Maybe it is because it was mostly before computers took over our lives.

Our children were raised within a stone's throw of the narcissist grandfather and the personality disordered aunt and uncle. The grandfather they learned to avoid as much as possible, since they had to milk the cows with him once a week. As adults they endure him with a certain exasperated constraint. Their grandmother was like an interesting character out of a story book, whose excruciating 55-year role was to mitigate the strangeness of their grandfather. She showered all her grandchildren with affection and good conversation. The aunt and uncle twins are (then and now) understood to be wacky and irrational.

One thing for certain, my children can handle knot-headed people they come across in their lives.