HAVING KIDS CLOSE IN AGE CAN MEAN, WELL, CLOSENESS
Despite the obvious parenting challenges, these siblings often seem to bond well
Imagine having four children under the age of four. That’s three kids likely still in diapers. Four car seats and boosters. Years of near-constant nursing if you’re breastfeeding. And — assuming you’re in a partnership — being not just outnumbered by your children, but doubled by them.
“When it’s getting out of hand,” says my friend, Becky Bergeron, who lives in my hometown of Deep River, Ont., “I say to my kids: ‘OK, how many mommies are there and how many kids?’”
In my last column, I talked about my own reluctance to have children close together in age — the joys of watching my older stepsons, ages nine and seven, care for and dote on their one-year-old baby brother; and I talked to my husband’s aunt, Michelle, who had three kids, one in the 1970s, one in the 80s and one in the 90s.
The spacing between children seemed luxurious to me.
I love the idea of having time to get back to yourself between pregnancies.
This week, though, I was curious to hear about the other side.
Becky and her husband, Andrew, had their fast family sort of by accident. Their daughter, Miriam, was a surprise. The twin boys, Asher and Elliot, were planned — and conceived a year after their daughter was born. And their son, Ira, was another pleasant surprise, coming along when the twins were two.
Now, the kids are ages five, three and one, and Becky can see the light at the end of the baby-stage tunnel. Ira will be two in March. She’s looking forward to being done with “the terrible twos.” She’s been changing diapers for almost six years.
So, first, the downside. “The hardest part about having four under four is that Andrew and I are both really social people, and our life really got put on hold for four years,” said Becky.
“I think if there had been more space, we could have gotten back into the things we enjoyed before we had to step out of them again. Just in the past year, we’ve started to find that our social life has picked up again.”
Not breastfeeding a baby every two hours, for example, means they can get out of the house for a night to go skiing, or see friends. By now, they have an established group of babysitters as well as grandparents and surrogate grandparents.
But by and large, Becky said she loves that her kids are close in age.
“They love being together. Obviously, like any siblings, they drive each other crazy sometimes. But they’re really, really close. Sometimes when it’s really quiet, I’ll peek in on them, and all four of them are looking at the same book and discussing it like a mini book club. They’re close enough that they want to spend time together without feeling like the baby is too little.”
She loves how interested and supportive they are of each other’s activities.
“They are each other’s biggest fans,” she said. Miriam plays Timbits hockey, for example.
“If her brothers knew how to write her name, they would have signboards for her at practice.”
They’re close enough that they want to spend time together without feeling like the baby is too little.”
They watch her in awe.
Becky has the kind, patient, easygoing personality that makes you understand how having four under four would be possible. And, watching her and her brood — my sister recalls seeing them all cycling to the park in a perfect line, for example — is really a marvel. She assures me it’s not all as von Trapp as it might appear, though.
“It’s not for everyone — it’s busy and very chaotic. But we’re very happy it turned out this way for us. We live by the ‘It takes a village’ mantra.”
By the time the fourth baby arrived, they’d really found their groove.
“When Ira came along, we were like, ‘We got this’.” They wouldn’t change a thing.
Sandy Cimino — a mother to three grown-up children and my husband’s former teacher in St. Albert — looks back on raising three close-in-age children with many of the same sentiments. Her kids were 18 months to two years apart, and she said it made life easier.
“They had things in common, so they would play together. I think they became really good friends because they were close together.”
Practically speaking, it was also easier when they were all in the same school, when they liked the same toys, when they could all play sports together.
That makes total sense. But I ask Sandy what I always ask my mom — wasn’t raising three so close together a major, exhausting, decades-long handful?
“You definitely don’t realize how tired you are at the time. When I look back on it now — when I see young moms, I think, ‘I don’t know how I ever did that.’ But it was just what you did, right? You could always find more love or more energy for them — or enough for all of them, somehow.”