I took the kids out for ice cream this afternoon with a friend. She also has six kids. The cashier asked if all of those kids were mine. When I told her six of them were, she sputtered, and then, honestly, said,
“Tell me. How does that happen? I mean really, how does it happen?!”
Let me just throw out there that she was old enough to know how these things happen. I wasn’t sure what exactly she wanted me to say. If it was biology, I wasn’t going there with my children within earshot. Who am I kidding? I wasn’t going there anyway. Really now.
I should have said something clever about a stork or how it was raining children one day or how someone just dropped them off on my doorstep and told me to have fun. But I didn’t. I muttered something about wanting a large family and loving my children and left it alone.
But really. How would you answer that?!
I liked the one where it was raining children one day. Great comeback if you can remember it next time.
One time I was asked if they all had the same daddy – that was when I only had 4, and before the transracial adoption. There is no bottom of the stupid ocean, is there.
I would respond exactly like what you wrote here. I would ask “do you really NOT know how it happens?”. Sometimes people just need their own stupid questions pointed out to them.
VOTED!!!!
“It happens with a purpose. That purpose being to raise a future generation of wise, intelligent, loving, caring individuals who will make this world a better place and hopefully share that purpose with their own children so that the world will not implode or waste away for the want of those things.”
-M (broken-hearted for the utter lack of respect for life this society shows regularly)
I voted!
Next time say “Yes, we know how it happens and we LIKE it”! That’s my plan….if I can ever find the guts to actually speak it. And when they say that I have my hands full I always heartily agree…they are full…of BLESSINGS! 🙂 But truly, where do people get the idea that it is OK to ask such rude questions.