The Question of Three

“What’s it like, having three kids?”

“How’s it going with three?”

“How are you doing? With three kids, I mean.”

That’s what everyone wants to know. The question is usually asked with a mixture of genuine curiosity, horror and pity. It’s like they are staring at a picture of a train wreck and asking a survivor how they managed to get out alive. They want to hear all about it but they can’t help but betray the better-you-than-me attitude.

Our concerned friends—the ones who really care about us—seriously want to know how we’re managing because God, three kids (!), how does one manage? They want to know if we’re ok because well, they are scared for worried about us. They are checking in to see if everything is going well, or if we need help, but there is always that hint of a suggestion that three kids is just too much for two parents to handle these days.

We also get this question from strangers and acquaintances: parents who kinda sorta wanted to have three but weren’t brave enough (or managed to get the vasectomy before there was an accident), parents who find one or two kids completely overwhelming and who think we are totally nuts, or people who secretly think we’re being greedy. These queries are actually in the hopes that we’ll tell them it really is as bad as they imagine, thereby affirming their own parenting decisions.

Coincidentally, we asked this very question a lot after we found ourselves unexpectedly expecting a third. Every time we ran into someone with three kids or even heard of someone with three kids, we would ask this question without even attempting to hide our hopes. Our question was really more of a pleading to please, please, tell us it isn’t as hard as we fear it will be. Tell us that by the third time around, the kid just slots right into the family and no one even notices that it wasn’t there before.

Raising young kids is hard physical work. It’s tiring and often kind of drudgerous. Discipline issues can be frustrating and mentally taxing. It really isn’t easy and with three kids, we’re outnumbered. Two parents, two hands. I can physically only hold onto two kids at a time. If they all run different directions, two parents can really only chase down two of them at any one time. It takes a different set of skills to manage three than it took to manage one. Fair enough. I totally get why people ask, why I asked and why I feared (heck, why I sometimes still fear) being a mom to three kids.

But I do find it interesting that the idea of three children is so universally considered to be such a terrifying burden. It seems to be the absolute limit to how many children people can even try to imagine having. I bet you anything that by the time someone announces their 4th or 5th child people don’t even ask anymore. They just smile and nod.

What do you think? Have you asked this or been asked this?