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Super-Motherhood
What can this mother of one learn from women who have five or more kids on purpose? More than she bargained for.
Catherine Ruth Pakaluk, a Harvard Ph.D.–holding economist at the Catholic University of America, in Washington, has eight children. She is interested—academically, as well as personally—in the 5 percent of women in the United States who, at a time of decreasing fertility across the Anglosphere, have five or more children on purpose. (The total fertility rate for American women, as calculated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2020, is 1.64, a number that represents each woman’s projected lifetime births.) Now Pakaluk’s new book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, is out with Regnery Publishing, a right-leaning imprint that recently brought us Josh Hawley’s Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs.
This book’s audience is not me. It’s full of biblical exegesis, and that’s when it isn’t trying to use economic theories of choice to explain what has happened in these women’s lives. But for anyone with an interest in the weird politics of contemporary American motherhood, it’s absolutely fascinating. Pakaluk’s interviewees—unlike the trad wife influencers who have been the object of so much fascination in liberal media since around 2016—are not packaging up their lives for curious onlookers. The women interviewed in this book are not, as far as I can tell, angling for spon-con deals, political clout, or hits of dopamine. Pakaluk’s interviewees are speaking, instead, to someone they trust. And as I made it through the book, I was surprised to finally feel as if I understood where these women are coming from.
If you have been immersed in “America’s Moms Are Not OK”–type content online, or if you are an American mom who is herself not OK, stepping into these stories of deliriously happy supermotherhood is a real trip. The women interviewed view their dives headfirst into family as a way of trusting their futures to fate—or, as most of them would say, to God. The mothers interviewed in Hannah’s Children, all of whom have college educations, are mostly religious, with a few interesting exceptions. But as Pakaluk points out, the story of declining fertility in this country is more complex than just “People who are religious have more children.” In fact, Catholic and Mormon fertility has decreased alongside the mainstream rate. These women are a different kind of religious, full of such faith that they seem to be living and working on a separate planet of possibility.
How their stories tend to unfold: They decide they want kids. They have some, then they have more and more. They find a kind of deep satisfaction in it, especially after the fourth or fifth one, such that they come to think that a big family compensates for everything else they’ve lost. They don’t sleep, they lose their “figures,” and if they keep on working outside the home, it’s at a reduced intensity. Although Pakaluk almost defensively reiterates that many of these women still maintain careers, those who do seem to be operating on a part-time or scaled-back basis, and there’s a lot of disdain for preschool and day care. Mentions of outside, nonfamily “help” in the home are scant. The kids, these women insist, will eventually take care of one another.
This is a book about the romance of having a big family, and its interviewees speak in almost mystical ways about the experience. The difference between having four and five and six and seven kids is marginal, once you get up there, or so Pakaluk and her interviewees argue. They say that even logistical problems obvious to me, like “How could a family with 12 kids ever have a family car?,” are solvable. “A lot of things that people think are going to be big expenses also don’t turn out to be. All my kids are wearing hand-me-down clothing,” one mother says. Reading statements like this, I want so much more documentation—give me schedules, budgets, disclosures of generational wealth, time logs!—but I think these women would say I’m missing the point. “People think on rational levels, and I think maybe a little bit more super-rational [thinking] has to infiltrate the masses to know that things are possible. Like possibilities of expansion in your life,” another interviewee says.
Although Pakaluk notes that she has included in her sample women who live below the poverty line, most of the stories seem to be about families who have “made it” beyond financial stress. By picking college-educated women, she writes, “I could get a cleaner sense of the role of kids in subjects’ descriptions of self-identity, marital quality, and life satisfaction without confounding variables from poverty and financial worry, since college education makes those things less likely.” This is, I suppose, true, but the choice also lends a decidedly rosy cast to these stories. The picture Hannah’s Children paints of large families is one of extreme prosperity, as if bestowed by God’s grace in return for their trust and hope in the future. Here are her descriptions of three different subjects’ homes:
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Her picture-perfect house was situated in a leafy, upscale suburb of Washington, D.C. Family photos taken on the U.S. Capitol steps graced her home. Dozens of similarly magazine-ready family pics lined her entryway, sent by her friends at the holiday season. Pics she’ll take down and replace next year. Surveying the wall of cards, I could see that many of her friends have big families too.
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We didn’t check Zillow, but Lauren’s home in one of the wealthiest zip codes in her state would easily boast a seven-figure valuation.
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From where we were seated, we could see into the rear living area of her house through glass doors. It looked like a page out of a Magnolia Journal magazine.
These women have also thrown themselves on the mercy of a man—they would say, also, on the mercy of God—and so far, it’s worked out. At least one of them married a guy who really wanted a big family and who, she admits while caveating that he’s not a “jerk,” wanted her tested for fertility before they got engaged. The interviewees have some memories of small gripes with their husbands in the exhausted days of early motherhood, but beyond that, they say they have watched their husbands “step up” and have loved them more because of it. One of the interviewees cites, as an example of husbandly help that she appreciates, her rule that she gets one week in bed and one week on the couch after every birth.
An interesting twist lies in the emerging idea of the mothers, and Pakaluk, that the youth mental health crisis—the topic of much theorizing—is due not to phones, or COVID, or the popularity of social-emotional learning curricula. The kids are sad and anxious, they theorize, because kids are growing up in small families and so never learn a sense of duty, responsibility, and belonging. Mothers whose older kids have to take care of babies argue that the tweens and teens have a sense of place, feel “useful.” When they share space, they learn to cooperate. It’s hinted that kids are depressed because they’re in day care and school, where they learn the wrong kind of belonging: attachment to peers and teachers, rather than siblings and parents.
Women who have no children, or one or two kids—people like me—are pursuing “lifestyle” and “identity” and “individualism,” these mothers say. We want a life that’s—as Pakaluk puts it—“autonomous, customized, self-regarding.” Our feminism is irrational and a sham. We want to take more vacations and drive fancy cars. We don’t feel actual happiness in our little families, because smaller families cannot possibly be as happy as big ones. In fact, we do not know what in life would make us truly happy. “I wish that women knew how strong we can be,” said one mother.
Pakaluk and I see different things in the stories of these mothers. She is inspired. I have some envy of their lives: If I had found my partner earlier, if our work and school trajectories had been different, might I have had more than one? Sure, maybe. I love mine, am generally more “OK” than many of my fellow mothers seem to be, and understand what these women mean when they describe being with their family as a joy and a respite from the world. But I also recognize in their interviews the telltale zeal of happy people who believe that adopting life practices they’ve found to work for them would work out the same for other people.
In the course of reading along, I imagined any number of parallel books. About kids who grew up as elder siblings in large families, and resented the work they had to do. About women who had many kids, spent years out of the workforce, then had their marriages dissolve and had to navigate the financial fallout. About fathers stressed by the constant work necessary to support such a family. About mothers who wanted more kids but feared they wouldn’t be able to mentally handle it, and didn’t go ahead with it. About families in which the expected “loaf of bread” that’s supposed to come under every kid’s arm when they’re born, according to a Spanish proverb Pakaluk quotes, never materializes, and the happiness of living with so many people in a close group doesn’t compensate for poverty.
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If you have a liberal friend or relative who still wonders aloud why social conservatives call themselves “pro-life” but don’t support family-friendly government programs, offer them this book’s perspective. Abortion, Pakaluk and her interviewees speculate, has been a contributory factor to the decline in women’s happiness in recent decades because babies (they swear) have an inherent antidepressant magic to them that makes people, especially women, happy. Social programs that offer maternity leave, baby bonuses, and subsidized day care have failed, in countries like Sweden, to enhance fertility rates. “These narratives” of these five-or-more mothers’ lives “sorely challenge family policy prescriptions, particularly pro-natalist policies,” Pakaluk writes. “Cash incentives and tax relief won’t persuade people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, and for their future children. If you want to find a policy angle to improve the birth rate, expanding the scope for religion in people’s lives is the most viable path. Make it easier for churches and religious communities to run schools, succor families, and aid the needs of human life. Religion is the best family policy.” Who, some liberals asked after the fall of Roe v. Wade, would impose something as big as “having a baby” on a woman? Who would ask a woman to trust that everything—money problems, relationship stress, health issues—will work out, if you just have that baby? This is who.
And to be honest, it’s more than a little bit terrifying. Because these women have an incredible capacity for self-abnegation. Reading about their lives is like reading about a bunch of Arctic explorers or professional athletes: superhuman people who resign themselves to sacrificing everything else to a goal. Pakaluk threads through her book references to a Kobe Bryant interview about how he could play through an Achilles tendon injury. In it, Bryant asked his interlocutor to imagine that they have a hurt hamstring and a fire breaks out in their house. “I’m willing to bet that you’re gonna forget about your hamstring, you’re gonna sprint upstairs, you’re gonna grab your kids, you make sure your wife’s good, and you’re gettin’ out of that house,” Bryant said. “And the reason is because the lives of your family are more important than the injury of your hamstring.” Pakaluk takes this story as a teaching tool to explain how some of her interviewees could choose to have a child under 5 in their care for 25 or 30 years. To me, it reads differently. Bryant was exceptional. These women are exceptional too, but I don’t think that means the rest of us are lacking in stamina. We just looked at our lives and decided not to play hurt.
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