A Quiver Full of Kids?

Ok, first of all, let’s just start with one! The Los Angeles Times, CNN, a professor from Columbia University, among other news media outlets are coming undone over Mitt Romney’s recent Southern Virginia University graduation speech.  In said speech, Romney encouraged the graduates to not fear defying the culture by marrying young and having many children.  He used the Old Testament Scripture taken from Ps 127:4-5 stating that “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the sons of one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them!”

I want to address this in today’s post, not to tell you what to think or how you should be responding.  You will get barraged by plenty of that, and as a champion of logic I have not created this to be that sort of outlet. I want to share with you the reflections of my own youth as a teenage girl encountering this same argument and the journey of shaping my opinions on marriage and career. 

I suppose that growing up in a fairly liberal public school I was more prone to hearing the arguments against marriage such as that of Adriana Velez: “when a man encourages you to go have a quiver full of children, or says that kids are pretty much emeralds only not as shiny, I think you should be skeptical.” And I found the question posed by Austin Ruse; “Is it really abnormal, immoderate, and fanatical to counsel early marriage and big families?” to be an affirmative in the abnormal and fanatical aspects.

Despite having a wonderful example in my parents, I somehow developed the idea that I needed to find my own success before I could ever consider getting married (which would probably never be on my agenda.) In addition and to my shame, I believed that early marriage and family life was reserved for those with less potential and I chose to reserve it as a fallback plan.

As I went on to pursue higher education, I imagined that women making sacrifices to raise their children were trapped, and I was bound and determined not to become one of them.  Then, God put me right where He wanted me, in a “Catholic” college of all places, and I encountered a beauty of people trulyliving that I had never known.  All that I thought I knew was nothing compared to the compassion and joy these students had, and I wanted to unlearn everything because I was not happy and I wanted to relearn how to live the joy I saw around me. 

The hardest part of this self-rewiring was in fact gaining the ability to recognize marriage as a beautiful partnership, whether or not it was my calling.  My perspective had become so corrupted by feminist thought that I feared I would never be able to appreciate marriage as a vocation. 

After years of living the simplicity and joy I learned and witnessing so many deep and passionate Christian marriages (I even took a Theology course on Christian marriage), I noticed that my heart began to ache for my other, and the strange desire to hold my own child began to overtake me.  God was not satisfied with a spark however, he wanted to fan that spark into a bonfire.  As St. Augustine said, “You were within me but I was outside myself, and there I sought you!”

I used the better part of the next eight years serving and seeking.  My heart grew more and more desirous of wanting to share with my beloved the union of marriage and the blessing of children.  God fanned that flame until I thought it would consume me; enter my husband and shortly thereafter our son. 

The point of this sharing is that we are all made and called to a vocation of loving and serving others and not to love and serve ourselves.  A quiver full of children or none at all, I am so thankful to have become able to see the quiver full of kids as an awesome adventure filled with joy and laughter rather than the nightmare of a disheveled mom in a minivan surrounded by terrors. 

Our perspective is gravely important in shaping the choices we make and if the beauty of a good is tainted then it may take a lifetime to retrieve, if we are able to retrieve it at all.