The McCaughey Miracle

The McCaughey Miracle

            First of all, I would like to thank the Booksale management for coming up with a really ingenious plan of selling back issues of magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal at incredibly low prices. If they didn’t, my TLE 100 teacher wouldn’t be able to purchase a copy. Then she wouldn’t be giving it to us for reading and reacting. Then I wouldn’t be writing this (in which case, I’m really glad Booksale did it). Seriously.

            In a nutshell, the article talks about Bobbi and Kenny McCaughey who is a late-twenty-something married couple who have a three-year old daughter, Mikayla, at around the time Bobbi gave birth to not one, two, but seven healthy babies (in one delivery!) and how they cope with their lives.

Well that was easy. It was 1998. Happy families weren’t part of the limited edition must-haves back then. It was a normal thing. But then, 1998 isn’t any different from 2012. In fourteen years, children, family, and the shaky road to marital satisfaction haven’t changed. Maybe there were teeny, tiny changes with the times (getting a little bit more modern), but deep down, children, family and marital satisfaction are still the same: they’re a lot to take in.

            For example: children. Francis Bacon was right when he said, “Children sweeten labors, but they make misfortunes more bitter.” I’m sure we all love babies, especially when they’re making goo-goo eyes at us, or laughing so innocently, or dancing so determinedly cute but I’m quite sure any normal person in his right mind will be pretty much annoyed when it comes to cleaning up the soiled clothes, or waking up late at night to tend to the bawling baby. This is difficult, but think how more difficult it can be when they can already walk, talk, and play, when they already strut around the house acting so hardheaded. That’s when they’re kids.  It’s even more difficult (if that’s possible) when, a few years later, they’re rarely ever home, or when they’re home, they’re so unbelievably impossible, and just plain bored. That’s when they’re teenagers. More years later, you don’t even know where they are or what they might be doing or if you do know where they are and what they’re doing, it’s not a big part of your business anymore. That’s when they’re adults and they start to move away from home. But they’re still your children. And in the family, they are the center of everything. Yes, children sweeten labors. At least, Bobbi and Kenny wouldn’t be in need of hired help around the house; the children may be able to do it someday. But the problem is how to raise them so that they can help around the house.

            It’s like what Peter De Vries wrote, “There are times when parenthood seems nothing but feeding the mouth that bites you.” Yes, children later on turn against you (I know; I did, sometimes), and if it’s already handful even if it’s just a child, how much more handfuls will it be if there are seven of them, all at once? Even Tanging Ina, Mrs. Ina Montecillo, with her famous twelve children whom she raised by herself (with the help of her husbands, when they were alive), admitted that, “Walang inang hindi napapagod.” She raised her children one at a time; but what would happen if seven came, all at the same time?

            Bobbi and Kenny have been very lucky and blessed so far. As of 1998, they have a new 5, 500-square foot and seven-bedroom house donated by building contractors and suppliers, plus six volunteers who help care for the babies. And Bobbi is efficiently organized when it comes to the babies, in fact, she now knows more about the seven-baby stuff to be able to cut down volunteer work from six days to three days only, so she can spend more time with her babies. Clearly, Muriel Spark was right, “Parents learn a lot from their children about coping with life.” They learn to change the diapers and wash the soiled baby clothes, feed and play with the baby, work for a cause (that’s a baby- and family-cause) and best of all, they learn that life is not really all about oneself: because when the babies come, they’re all you have time to think about. And that’s a very tall order for a couple who is only in their late twenties (for every couple in fact, young or old). How do they even manage to stay as a couple?

            I think that’s when the marriage stuff comes in. A Reader’s Digest quote says, “A wedding is an event, but marriage is an achievement.” And although my favourite writer Jane Austen wrote that, “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance”, I still agree with Herbert Samuel that, “It takes two to make a marriage a success and only one a failure.” It’s not all about love every time, there’s got to be effort between both parties: an effort to reach out, to adjust, to share, to get things straightened out, to fight if needed. After all, I suppose what makes married life so like married life are the fights; you’re not really married if you don’t have those wars of the sexes, or principles. I mean these fights are not childish skirmishes where you’re just spoiling for trouble; these fights often happen because both parties are trying to reach a compromise, but they haven’t agreed yet. This is normal. You just have to see beyond these fights and not let them be the end of the marriage. Or babies, for that matter (some couples stay so wrapped up with the babies that they forget they were a couple in the first place). After all, marriage really is a word…it’s not a sentence! If you really love that person enough to marry him/her, then exert effort enough to stay married!

            This includes quality time with each other, managing the finances of course, and many other things. With Bobbi and Kenny, they schedule the babies’ nap and sleep hours with the Kenny’s arrival from work, so that Kenny can help put the babies to sleep and the couple can have a few hours alone afterwards, catching up. Of course the finances are considerably increased now, but they are managing their income pretty well, also writing a book on their sudden fame. The trick is to do things slowly, so that you can afford the changes.

            This is certainly hard work but then as Bobbi would advise to other couples who want large families (or even small ones), “I’d tell them not to expect to have time for the things they enjoy for a while. I’d tell them to set their priorities. The babies need them, whether or not their floor is scrubbed and the house cleaned. And I’d tell them that the fun stuff outweighs the bad.” The fun stuff does outweigh the bad; if married people didn’t think so, there wouldn’t be babies and families anymore, would there?

            Still, with God, and a little help from friends, a loving couple can stick it out together, with and eventually without the babies!