Shouts of glee could be heard from the producers of daytime gabfests across this country when Little Rock’s very own Duggar family and its matriarch, Michelle Duggar, announced earlier this month she was knocked up again.
Knocked up hardly seems the right term when you’re on your 18th kid – perhaps knocked over or even knocked senseless would be more apropos.
Maybe you haven’t been introduced to the Duggars – a group multiplying faster than gremlins at Water World. Imagine being trampled by them trying to get a pretzel at an Arkansas mall.
Nevertheless, the news, especially coinciding with Mother’s Day, was welcome fodder for talk shows needing to fill that vacant bottom of the third hour slot. It also was good news for the cable station, TLC, which now almost solely caters to women expecting litters. One might think a couple with this kind of propensity for adult relations be relegated to one of those triple-digit adult channels by this point – the kind that curious teens watch through the squiggly lines while their parents are in the other room.
On the surface, the story is sickeningly sweet. Boy meets girl. Boy loves girl. Boy really loves girl. Boy, stop loving girl or we will be forced to get the fire hose.
I don’t want to be the proverbial child who walks into his parents’ bedroom in the middle of the night in need of a glass of water and puts a damper on things. But how many kids are too many kids?
Give them credit. The Duggars plan is ingenious. The older kids (the oldest is 20) are actually implemented as a slave labor force to care for the younger children. This presumably frees up the parents to focus on – well, do I have to draw pictures here, folks?
At this point, I can only surmise three theories for why the Duggars are pro procreators: a) they’ve missed that seventh grade science lesson and they don’t know what’s causing this, b) they’re attempting to win a spot in some record book or c) they’re forming a small militia that will eventually overthrow our government. They’ve already passed the line of demarcation where they’d be an effective family band (everybody wants to be Keith) and they’re too small to form an NFL football franchise (though I like the depth of their bullpen for the Rockies).
I have no problem with large families, provided you don’t need me to babysit. I do, however, have a problem on behalf of some 2.1 million couples that are infertile and the 9.3 million women who have resorted to fertility services in an effort to add a missing piece to their families. Yes, while one family is doing its best impression of a gestational Tic Tac box, other couples struggle, often fruitlessly, to ever have children. I, thankfully, can’t understand that kind of anguish or how hard it is to hear stories like these.
In light of those harsh realities, the Duggars ability to have child after child after child could come off as braggadocios, if not just plain cruel.
Is that the Duggars fault or even their problem? No. They are well within their rights. The last thing I would ever want to do is suggest a one-child limit similar to China or suggest we don’t have children out of respect for couples who can’t. Nor, do the Duggars owe some apology to infertile couples any more than a family who is simply blessed with one child.
Still, would it be unreasonable to ask that they loan out their children on a regular basis to couples who cannot have children? We’d call it the Duggar family library. Oh, c’mon, they’ve got 18 kids. They’re going to miss one for a couple years?
Again, far be it from me to judge the Duggars. They can do what they want and they have, over and over and over again. But when they hit kid number 45 (she’s only 41) and you’re watching hour 12 of “The Today Show,” wondering how they do it (in the figurative sense, of course), just remember it doesn’t always come that easy.
And that’s a shame.
