You've Got Your Hands Full

"Wow-- you sure have your hands full!" is something I hear pretty regularly and have been hearing for years.  Depending on my mood and how it is said to me, it can make me angry, defensive or feel understood.

I can't possibly imagine why we elicit attention from strangers?

I have been hearing some version of this for years.  Starting our family out with a set of identical twin boys, we have been attracting attention from strangers everywhere we go for almost seven years.  Adding two more boys to the mix along the way hasn't dialed down the attention and comments we get.  In fact, I think it has increased tenfold.

These days, Aaron has just about caught up to the his big brothers in stature, so we are now stopped to ask if they are triplets almost daily.  Just this past week, I was approached at Target, our rec center pool and church with comments about having so many boys.

I'll be the first to admit that there are hard days with four little kids.  Really hard days.  Sometimes I do feel like my hands are full.  However, I often resent a stranger saying this to me, especially in front of my children.  Its kinda like when you were a kid, you could say the meanest things about your own siblings, but someone else says something slightly negative about them and you're ready to thrown down.

I think the comment can come across as judgmental.  A lot of times, I hear "you're doing a terrible job" or "your kids are out of control" or "you have more kids than you can handle."  Perhaps that is not what the stranger is intending.  Maybe its my own issues of feeling inadequate that day.   I'm realizing now that sometimes the older people saying that to me are actually just wanting to reminisce about their own days of parenting multiple little children.  When we talk for a few minutes, it will sometimes come out in the conversation that they had three boys of their own or four children in five years or something similar.  I can now see that maybe the comment is meant to be a bridge or an opening to talk about their own experiences. 

However, on the hard days when I'm in Target just trying to buy milk and diapers or the two missing ingredients for our dinner, I don't appreciate the comment.  When a simple errand involves taking four children along and countless disgruntled looks from other customers, a comment like this can send me to the verge of tears or at minimum to cause the stress to well up inside of me. 

If its a trip where my kids aren't on their best behavior, I have to suppress the urge to say something mean in response or come down too hard on my kids.  They are little boys after all.  They aren't going to be on "perfect" behavior for every errand.  They are going to have a difficult time keeping their hands to themselves, not asking for the candy and sweets on display and walking in a straight line out of other people's way.  My job is to teach them and my goal is progress, not perfection. 

I've always though of this attention as only being stressful or negative for me, not the boys themselves.  Today though, I started to see the comments through their eyes.  This morning, I took the twins to a Muffins with Moms breakfast at their school.  We happened to arrive a few minutes early.  We were waiting in the hallway and James asked me why I hadn't brought any muffins along.  Our conversation went like this:

"Mom, didn't anyone ask you to bake muffins for this?"

"No"

"Oh, they probably didn't ask you because you have four kids and that's a little out of control.  Maybe they didn't think you'd be able to bake muffins.  They should know though, it isn't out of control.  You could totally do it."

First, I love this boy.  He's sticking up for his mom against whoever he thinks wouldn't believe I could handle baking muffins along with taking care of four boys.  Secondly, I am starting to wonder if I'm not the only one in the family that tires of hearing that people think you are a three-ring circus everywhere you go (even though admittedly, we sometimes are).

Long ago, Jon & I decided not to tell the twins who was older.  Primarily, Jon wanted to avoid years of hearing "I'm two minutes older" and having one of them lord it over the other.  I cannot tell you how often we get asked this question in front of our children along with questions like "Who is a better athlete? Who is smarter?  Who is the more independent one?"  I know that sometimes people are just curious but do they not realize that my children are right there with their ears and hearts open to hear what I say?  I have actually had several strangers get annoyed with me when I say, oh, we don't talk about that or they don't know who is older, I had a c-section so it was a matter of sixty seconds and we didn't think that's important to talk about.

I feel like I was on guard about the twin comparisons, but this idea of the boys being too many, too much or too loud has slipped past me.  I'm not thrilled that my kids are starting to pick up on it. 

My usual response to "wow, you have your hands full" is just to smile and say something like "yep, we are a busy family."  Maybe that is still the appropriate response because it is a two minute conversation with a stranger after all.  Maybe though, I need to start having more conversations with my kids in the car afterwards about how glad I am that we have so many boys.  There was a time before any of the boys were here that I wondered if I'd ever have any children.  After we lost our 4th baby to a miscarriage, I wondered again if there would be more and then we were blessed to have Caleb. 

It may be easy for strangers to see that I have my hands full some many days, but what they don't see is that my heart is full every day.  And for that I am thankful.