EASTER, or WHY I HAD ALL THESE KIDS

I think I've figured out why I had all these kids.

WE, actually, of course, had them. Fred contributed half the genetic material (as well as the medical insurance covering the actual births) of the bio kids. He got fingerprinted for the adoption paperwork on the adopted kids. He talked nicely to the social worker during the homestudy, when he could have said, "Heck, lady, I don't know why she wants more dang kids around."

The whole six kids thing was, however, pretty much my idea. I decided it was a good idea and Fred, bless his heart, allowed himself to be convinced that I was right, although I was actually probably pretty much mostly insane.

Anyway. Easter. Tillie home from college, as she is every Sunday, to do her laundry. She decided that of course the little girls needed to decorate eggs, which I had not bothered to do anything about. After eighteen years of egg decorating, by golly I'm tired of it. Luckily, if you have kids long enough, you reach a point where the older kids do that for you.

So some of them rushed out to Wal-Mart and returned with egg dye and white eggs (our usual eggs, laid by chickens of family friends, are brown and not dyeable). Tillie also decided to try blowing out eggs, which involved much looking through drawers for a pin and then trying to figure out how, exactly, one blows out an egg.

Alan got into the egg blowing thing too. They sat there at the kitchen table with their cheeks puffed out and slimy goo seeping from the other ends of the eggs into bowls.

Amelia, Lillie, and Francie dyed eggs and got messy stuff all over the newspapers strewn across the table. Grandma had dropped off chocolate and Peeps, and there were many wrappers on every flat surface and much "Get that chocolate off the floor, the dog's going to eat it."

Angelo was conspicuous by his absence, but he's never really grasped the concept of Family Activities.

There was mess, noise, and people going places without checking with everyone else first. Once two or three people decide we need, for example, egg dye from Wal-Mart, they mill around for a bit, gathering up other people who want to go, and finding the checkbook, and shoes, and eventually they just go. I've thought many times that it's like birds getting ready to migrate. They gather, more and more of them, then start making short swooping flights just to test the air, then eventually they all rise up and just go. It's not scheduled. You could get up on Sunday morning and say, for example, "At two o'clock we're going to drive to Wal-Mart for egg dye," but it wouldn't work out that way.

I did not grow up like this. Holidays at Grandma's house (my father's mother) meant everyone sitting stiffly in the living room together, enmeshed in long periods of silence, waiting for something to happen. (When alone, my grandmother actually watched TV wearing hose, shoes, a housedress (does anyone use that word any more?), sitting up straight in a chair with her arms folded across her chest. We would sometimes go over to visit her and you could see her through the glass in the door, just before we rang the doorbell, and that was what she was doing.)

Her house was always the same, always neat. Holiday meals were over quickly because everyone just ate and then it was done. They didn't sit around the table telling family stories and laughing, the way I'd seen TV families do.

Then we'd sit around the living room again for a while without much to say, until it was finally time to leave.

I think I resent the mess around here, the noise, the lack of organization. Then I remember the alternative. We could sit in silence in the living room, waiting for something to happen. Oh, yeah. This is why I had all these kids. Something is always happening whether you want it to or not. You don't have to plan it, and then worry that it didn't work out. It's just there.

I'm not capable of Making Life Happen through the force of my magnetic personality, because I don't have one. So I had kids. I knew there was a reason.

EASTER QUOTE FROM LILLIE:

Lillie, age five, wants to be a Coldstone Girl when she grows up. That means she wants to work at Coldstone Creamery, an ice cream store where her big sister, Tillie, age 18, works in the summers.

Lillie: "Mommy, when I get big and I'm a Coldstone Girl, I'm going to clean for you and do all the work in the house and you won't have to do ANYTHING."

Pause.

"You can just rest like Daddy."