Not a ‘Normal’ Family : Four Daughters (and No Sons)--and a Million Reasons Why
After years of studying the mating habits of married couples, several distinguished social scientists have concluded the “normal” American family consists of one boy and one girl.
This major scientific discovery, which was based on exhaustive research with their Nintendo sets, proves something I’ve known all along: My family is not normal. In fact, my family, which consists of one wife, one collie, four children (all girls) and two goldfish (sex unknown) is nowhere near “the norm.”
This ground-breaking demographic research also revealed there is a “preference for boys” in this country, according to a recently published report in Demography, the journal of the Population Assn. of America.
Furthermore, couples who have sons are “slightly more likely to stay married” because fathers are usually more involved with their sons than with their daughters, and this creates the strong family ties necessary to hold a marriage together.
Several other studies have shown that couples who have a daughter first are more likely to divorce.
So after weighing all the evidence, I had to conclude that having four daughters and no sons means I’m either four times more likely to get a divorce or four times more likely to stay married--if you take into account the “child-support corollary.”
When people see our four daughters, ages 2 to 9, they usually ask: “You were trying for a son, right? And you kept having daughters, right? And you felt genetically deficient--not quite a man--because you couldn’t produce a son, and pretty soon you realized it’d be easier to win Lotto than have a boy, so after four girls, you finally gave up and decided to raise goldfish, right?”
“Wrong. Wrong. Entirely wrong. I was actually trying for the Lennon Sisters,” I respond, and then make it clear I don’t share their “preference for boys,” usually by uttering a few choice words.
Some people pursue a different line of interrogation and ask if we came into this windfall of children because my wife was on fertility drugs and had triplets. Why else would anyone have four (never mind what sex they are) kids in this day and age? Others inquire whether the four girls were the products of two marriages, sort of like the Brady Bunch.
And there are those who ask personal questions like, “Couldn’t you exercise some self-restraint?” or “Pardon me, but have you heard of the exciting new concept called ‘family planning’? Here’s my card. Call me. We’ll do lunch.”
When we walk into a restaurant, a murmur usually rushes through the crowd, and people stop slurping their soup to stare at us with linguini hanging from their chins while the grandmotherly matriarchs chortle, “Oh, how cute, four little girls!” And the yuppie materialists sneer, “Bad investments, very bad investments. He’ll have to pay for their college education, and then they’ll only get married and he’ll have to pay for the weddings; besides, there’s a shortage of available men, so even the marriage prospects don’t look good demographically.”
Most people can’t understand why anyone would want four kids in this enlightened era of moderation and limited financial resources, not to mention stock market volatility and high tuition costs.
Whenever my wife was pregnant and I announced the news to my co-workers, they’d look at one another and roll their eyes and whisper things like, “Are they looking for tax write-offs? Investment property would be a better deal.”
It’s not easy not being “normal.” I admit that every so often, we envy our friends who have 1.5 kids--one son and half a daughter--because they get to vacation in Anguilla while we’re assembling swing sets and throwing peanuts to squirrels at the park.
Maybe we should have consulted a financial planner or at least an astrologer before we went ahead and started recklessly procreating. Maybe we should have had a long-range plan, sort of like Xerox.
I wish I could say, “After consulting our accountant and the parish priest and Planned Parenthood and after getting dispensation from Zero Population Growth and a blessing from the National Organization for Women, we figured we could afford to raise four daughters if we invested in AAA-rated debentures for 30 years at 8.3% and saw a marriage counselor and a family therapist twice a week and struggled through the teen years until we reached retirement when our kids could support us.” But that didn’t happen.
Fortunately, you can’t see The Total Picture when you start a family. If you could preview parenthood from start to finish like a strategic corporate plan, it would be so terrifying, married couples would probably take the vow of celibacy to avoid the cost of raising kids and providing food, shelter and Barbie accessories, and to escape the debilitating parental fear that somewhere, somehow something has to go wrong, and the painful fact of life that kids don’t always turn out the way you’d like them to.
On the other hand, sometimes they do. And they sure can carry on better conversations than goldfish.
