Duggar Envy 11 comments

By Kelly Foster

As a teenager, I made most of my money from babysitting.

More often than not, my weekend evenings were spent reading to small children, tucking them into bed, making sure the requisite nightlights were good and turned on, ascertaining that teeth had been brushed, bladders emptied, and prayers said.

It was a wistful youth.

Because I ached already for the kind of stable, lamplit future in which I’d kiss my own children’s downy little heads (what would they possibly look like?) just before they fell asleep in rooms I’d decorated myself with stars and moons and characters from fairy tales.

I do not have any children.

And I’ve spent the majority of my adulthood in very different types of lamplit places, good in their own ways and for very different reasons than the ones I ever could have anticipated. And I get the privilege, living so close to home, of watching my dear old friends and their dear little children grow and learn. This has many benefits.

First, I see without sentimentality that it’s pretty damn hard to raise children and ever feel like you are doing anything right, even when it’s quite obvious to all other eyes save your own that it’s a pretty happy, well-adjusted little magic creature you’ve got on your hands.

Second (and this of course is the great, much-bandied commonplace of the single adult—nonetheless it’s quite true), I get the benefit of hanging out with kids whenever I like and whenever they are pleasant and snuggly and giggly and cute, and then of passing them back off to their parents when they are being impatient and unpleasant and stubborn. I do not like—nay, I become positively mournful and unkind—when I don’t get enough sleep, and I don’t know if anyone out there realizes this, but children have a nasty habit of interrupting one’s precious sleep. I feel certain I would hold this against them.

These benefits notwithstanding, I do still dream about children of my own, and who knows what the future will bring. Until then, I babysit my friends’ little ones, and occasionally I watch TV shows about children.

Enter the Duggars.

Yes, it’s true. Rebellious, iconoclastic, potty-mouthed, dark-humored, anti-pop evangelical me watches and yes, likes, the Duggars. I like them a lot.

When I watch 18 Kids and Counting with my parents, my dad just shakes his head and says, “That’s lady’s crazy. Just straight up crazy” (I suppose that’s the sort of clinical language most therapists are trained to use at their fancy therapist schools).

And I get it. I do.

It’s weird, right? The whole prolific Susannah Wesley thing. The crunchy charismatic permed hair. The long denim skirts with fleece vests. The soft-spoken submissive subservience. I get it. I really do. And there are few alternate universes less remote from me than the one in which I could envisage myself in any kind of similar position. I could not. She’s married to someone named Jim Bob, for crying out loud. It’s not 1934. And I’m not a Walton.

The whole narrative arc of 18 Kids and Counting is built around the premise that these people are doing something countercultural (or at least more countercultural than your average subject on reality TV, the kind that eat bull testicles for money and vie for the hearts of shallow millionaires they’ve only just met). They attend a Pentecostal church. They (obviously) have a larger family than the American average. They homeschool their kids. They teach their daughters to be traditional wives, and mothers, their sons to be good providers, husbands, and fathers.

One whole episode was devoted to their oldest son’s engagement and sexual abstinence before marriage. They didn’t even kiss before the wedding, for Pete’s sake.

I watched the episodes leading up to the wedding and then watched, with rapt attention, the climactic wedding episode. While the cynic in me scoffed, something softer, more primordial, more maternal in me craved its own place in that well-ordered world.

And I was reminded that even though one can see the artifice in such intentional goodness and light, it does not negate all positive effects—structure, hope, clear purpose, a sense that the Universe is looking favorably down on one’s daily life. I feel like those people laugh well together when they are alone. I feel like those people know how to sleep well at night. I don’t mind saying I envy them that.

As a bit of an extrovert, I always wondered what it would have been like to have been reared in a larger family—to have had an instant community. As a kid who moved from house to house quite a bit in my formative years, I longed for the sense of continuity, of heritage, of history, of belonging, that I assumed would accompany many siblings or many sons and daughters in my much-imagined future.

I know that it’s all more complicated than that, of course, and my parents, both of them products of large families, are living proof that peace of mind does not necessarily flow from the number gathered round one’s hearth and home.

But still, I envy Duggar kind. I like them. Perhaps it’s simply the same television-engendered envy that accompanies any glossy, commercialized production on any well-marketed network. Perhaps.

And yet.

I remember what it felt like to be a teenage girl keeping temporary watch over the homes of your more Earth-mothery, homeschooly, conspiracy theory-believing types of moms. You know the kind I’m talking about. The kind that grind their own wheat. The ones who only have goat milk and almond butter and organic quinoa in the fridge. The kind who don’t have a TV.

I wanted to be them. I still do sometimes. I still remember what it felt like to be sitting bedside in their small children’s clean and peaceful rooms, reading again and again, “It’s time for bed, little mouse, little mouse, darkness is falling all over the house.... Goodnight, you, and goodnight, me, and good morning to all the lovely mornings that soon will be.”