Four Under Five
Observations about life with young children.
Hi Everyone,
Happy Wednesday.
Family life is on my mind a lot lately so it’s what I am writing about. I am loving seeing men take up a mantle online to talk about the wonders of being a father. We are not a pro-life culture (and I mean that in the broadest sense, not just abortion) and we are pro-choice as far as we can take it. What I see online is men, good men, responding and offering once again a different and better option.
One of those men runs a Substack called Grounded Builder. He wrote a great essay on his 40th birthday that I recommend reading. You can find it here.
Also, I recently organized my website. All the articles are organized by topic and easy to find. The topics I organized by are:
Saints and Greats (about great men)
Young Men (directed primarily at those under 35)
Bible Me (lessons I’ve learned from the Scriptures)
Work and Career (Be a Kingdom advocate at work)
Family Life (the center and gravity of civilization)
Don’t forget, you can hop on the chat anytime. It’s usually just me hanging there but if you post something, I’ll reply.
Today’s topic is about having children. Enjoy.
I used to read 75+ books a year. Now it's more like 25 to 30, and usually it's books I've read at least once. I used to work out six days a week, sometimes multiple times a day. I had time for strength training, mobility work, recovery, anything I needed to be in top physical condition. Now if I get in two workouts a week, that's a win. I used to have a fully optimized, disciplined morning and evening routine. I still have my morning routine. It is disciplined but less optimized. I used to live for myself and think I was a man. Now I live for four others and soon to be five. I'm finally beginning to understand what it means to be a man.
I don't want to leave the impression that those younger years are bad or irresponsible or entirely selfish, because they're not. They are necessary. They are preparation for later decades. It's good for a young man to keep himself busy with good activity like exercise, reading books, learning, and working on his career. It is a necessary foundation for the rest of life. But that stage of life must be graduated to make room for a greater stage of life. What I don't see coming from much of the manosphere is graduation from the early 20s stage into the stage where a man becomes a man by taking on responsibility for others. Most of the manosphere is perpetual self-service in preparation for nothing. It is silly to think you can live your 20s for the rest of your life, and yet that is what a lot of people are promoting and many are buying into it. We have forgotten that those solo years of preparation are actually preparation for something. Hopefully, those years are preparation for giving your life away.
As I am writing this article, my wife and I are eagerly awaiting our fourth child. In August of this year, we will celebrate six years of marriage. We found out we were pregnant with our first daughter four months after we said “I do”. Just over a year later, we found out we would be expecting our first son, and a year after that we found out we were expecting our second daughter and our third born.
The first two are 21 months apart; the second two are 18 months apart. Number three and number four will be 18 months apart. For a brief period, I will have four children four and under, and then come August, when I celebrate six years of marriage, I will have four kids five and under. People look at us like we’re crazy when we tell them how many kids we already have or as we try to wrangle the hooligans in the grocery store. At least once a week, someone over 50 will tell my wife that we're only supposed to have two kids, or that three is too many. Occasionally, there are looks of contempt and bitterness, for who knows what reason. I’ve been told once “that is peak climate irresponsibility” which made me laugh. Yeah, as if my children are a great threat to Earth. We also get looks of sadness from the many couples we know who cannot have children no matter what they try. For some, it's been a year. For some, it's been three years and for others it's been five years of trying to have a child without getting to see those two little pink lines.
Our life is a little bit of madness and a lot of beautiful. It takes us an hour to get out of the house, and usually two to three outfit changes plus one poopy diaper. There's a mess on the floor at all times as the children leave a trail behind every activity. The kids are pretending to: grocery shop, sail boats, go on adventures, pretend to live in multiple houses (my son has 14 according to him),play teacher. Every utensil has become a shovel for digging their many holes in all the wrong places.
The sin of children is covetousness. There's not an hour of the day where they don't want something their brother or sister has that they didn't want until they knew they couldn't have it. Covetousness in a child manifests as screaming, tears, hair pulling, scratching, and falling to the ground in a fit of rage.
The most interesting conversations I've ever had are with my children. At one point, my oldest daughter told me she had 12 brothers and sisters and that her queen mother “just couldn't handle it.”She’s had five dads who all died from scratching their knees or falling off a horse. She has been 23 years old, 12 years old, 35 years old, and 100 years old all in the same conversation. Apparently she married our neighbor Alex who owns the local ice cream shop. All of this conversation happened while she was wearing her Elsa dress, pretending to be a queen in Arendelle.
People have asked me why we're having so many kids. It's not that many historically. Plenty of people had six to ten. My mother is one of six, and my father is one of five. In the current era, it's a lot when people are choosing to have no more than two. When people ask the question I never really know how to answer the question. They ask, "Do you want that many?" in a similar to tone to how people ask what you want to eat or what you want for Christmas. It’s an odd question only made possible by contraception which we don’t believe in using. We are working with different frameworks for life when the question arises. Since I don’t really know how to respond, I say, "yeah, we’re halfway there" which usually ends the conversation.
Some assume we have children just for the joy they bring us. They do bring us great joy, but that's not the reason we've had children. The honest-to-goodness reason we are having more and more children and will continue to have children is because I love my wife. And she loves me (most days). The love that we have creates new life. It's not much more complicated than that. I also adore my children. This weird, unexplainable thing happens each time we add another child: I come to love each of them more. I loved my oldest when it was just her but when we added our second, my love for the oldest grew. It happened again when we added the third and I am certain it will happen again when baby number four finally arrives.
It takes great love and great sacrifice to parent children. You will either be their greatest blessing or a curse that lives upon their lives. A failure at fathering (and by failure I mean a grand failure like abandonment, non-presence, abusive behavior and language) will cause more harm to those little ones than anything the rest of the world could do. You must watch yourself carefully, because the lives of the little ones are at stake, and if you fail, who knows what treacherous deeds they could take out into the world. Children can offer you next to nothing, except for fun moments and laughs. Well, I shouldn’t say next to nothing because that isn’t accurate or true. They’ll teach you about faith, trust, prayer, imagination, play, and many other good things we adults forget as move through the world.
They require everything of you: all of your attention, all of your provision, all of your protection. You have to lay down your life for theirs every day, which is something you can only understand after you've had a couple. It takes all the manliness you have and even the manliness you don't possess to raise a child. I think that's one of the reasons so many are forgoing children altogether. Maybe they aren't willing to sacrifice, or maybe they don't know how, since we live amidst the most fatherless generation in this country's history. I cannot imagine the fear another might have about raising children if he was fatherless.
At this time in my children’s life, I am God to them (not literally). In their mind there is nothing I am incapable of doing, and they come to me for everything. I can protect them from the “mean guys”, fix every toy, win every battle, purchase their every desire. There will come a day where they realize I am not God and I'm just a human who has made a multitude of mistakes. That will be a very disappointing and disorienting time in their life. Every child experiences it.
I'm reading East of Eden right now. One of the brothers, named Charles, who admires his father and seeks after his love but never attain it, comes to realize his father may have been a scammer. He is dumbfounded and clueless how to process it. It rocks his whole world and becomes his obsession. His father was a bit of a scammer. The reader of the book knows this, but Charles doesn't know it. It takes him years of his life to wrestle with the fact that his dad was not who he thought he was. I hope that will not be said or thought by my children.
It's a noble calling to father children: to raise them in faith and morals, to form their character, to play adventure. If you're a father, you know it's a calling that calls every day. A question we men have to ask ourselves every morning is, "Will we answer the call?".
Thanks for reading.
Keaton
Good job, son