Married (with a lot) of Children

It was a beautiful June evening in Madison, Connecticut, an upscale seaside town. An unseasonably cold wind coming off the Long Island Sound had stopped. So had the rain that fell earlier in the week. This was the kind of evening you go out in. Anne Bascom thought so. The two-year-old went for a walk, down a dead-end street and in between houses to the nearby beach. A family friend says she saw Anne leaving shortly before 8:00 but didn’t think anything of it. Anne never wanders off.

Some of the other Bascom kids - there are seven of them -had coaxed their dad outside to play volleyball in the neighbor's front yard. At 8:40, Paul Bascom says, he and his kids headed back to the house.

Then came the chilling meeting of the eyes that every parent knows. Each had thought the other had Anne.

Mom, dad, kids, friends - everyone started searching for the baby, Paul remembers. Without luck. Paul went to see if she was outside. She was - in the arms of Officer Robert Mulhern of the Madison Police Department.

Mulhern told me later what had happened. "A witness saw the child on a rock ledge for over an hour," he said. "Or something like that." He admitted that he didn't have the police report in front of him. Half a year later, memory is dim. "I took the child around for probably another half-hour. She barely spoke," Mulhern said. "I found a neighborhood kid who recognized her."

Sergeant Todd Curry joined his officer to assist him. Officer Mulhern held Anne. "He had created a little bond with the child," Curry told me later.

Paul walked forward to greet the police officers as Mary walked out of the house behind him. Mulhern thrust Anne toward Mary and ordered her to change her diaper. "No," Mary said. "I want to know what's going on."

Curry told the Bascoms they were involved in a "very serious situation"; Paul would have to go to the station for questioning. The gratitude the Bascoms felt for the police finding Anne turned into anxiety. It only got worse in a months-long series of events that saw them handcuffed, arrested, and told that Anne might be taken away from them - a threat that still hovers over them today.

Talk to large families about the difficulties they face in today's world and they'll give you an earful. I know because I did. The ideas in this article are largely theirs. The trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a large family that they shared were fleshed out and made vivid in the harrowing story the Bascoms told me.

"They seemed to be good parents," said Curry, whose decisions set in motion the chain of events that still haunts the Bascoms (and which, he says, were mandated by police protocols). "It's just a large family. It seems to me that maybe they lost track."

Parents couldn't possibly keep track of so many children - it's a suspicion large families are familiar with. Richard Amrhine, columnist for the Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Virginia, summed up this usually unspoken prejudice in a summer column commenting on the case of the Kelly family in Manassas.

Kevin Kelly was at home with 12 of his 13 children while his wife visited her ailing father in Ireland with one of their oldest. Frances, not quite two, was left in the family van after errands one day. Seven hours later, she was found strapped in her infant car seat, dead.

"Good parents these days don't have 13 kids," Amrhine wrote. "It's not cute, or funny, or right. It's stupid and irresponsible." He called incidents like Frances's death "not only tragic, but criminal." On November 20, a Manassas jury agreed, convicting Kelly of involuntary manslaughter.

Regent University School of Law associate professor David Wagner said some of the evidence in the Kelly case was suggestive but that a manslaughter charge was too severe: "That's for the sort of parents to whom it comes as news that they are expected to look after their kids."

Wagner was at Frances's funeral. "Sharing the grief of that family gathered around the baby-sized coffin, and knowing that for them the pain of loss was compounded immeasurably by well-founded fears of criminal charges and possible prison time, was, for me, as close to 'unbearable' as I've ever gotten," he said.

But what makes the Kelly incident seem unlikely is precisely that so many people - a large family's worth -forgot the baby. What are the odds of that? Check other incidents of children dying in cars, and you'd be convinced that a large family is the best defense against it. A Houston couple in August took one child out of the car, and each thought the other had gotten the second child. Her corpse was discovered six hours later. In an ABC news special on the phenomenon, all the families were small.

A large family is a web of intimate relationships. It forms a whole bigger than the sum of its parts. But look at it from the two-child world, and you’ll see a teeming mass of people - a day care, not a community of love. You'll think, "No wonder no one noticed the one who wandered off."

The Bascoms think they may have come face to face with another aspect of large-family suspicion.

It' what Mary Hasson, a mother of seven, calls the "Neanderthal" syndrome. "If you have many children, then it's assumed you must be a Neanderthal in every way," she said. "The dad must dominate the wife, beat the children, be morally rigid and repressive. The poor wife must be a doormat with low self-esteem, a flabby figure, frumpy clothes, and no ambition." This ready-made and mostly unconscious image affects the way people see large families.

When Paul came back from the police station, Mary had already put the kids to bed. Paul, feeling agitated, was reading on the back patio a half-hour past midnight when he saw a police cruiser and another car pull up and park in front of his house. It was Officer Mulhern and a tall, blond woman, who turned out to be a Connecticut Department of Children and Families social worker.

That part was fairly typical, said Gary Kleeblatt, a Department of Children and Families spokesman. "If we receive a complaint, we are required by law to conduct an investigation." But what the Bascoms say happened next, he told me, was "not typical."

The social worker, who mentioned that she herself had only one child, said she wanted to wake all of the children to interview them. Paul and Mary said they didn't think that was necessary. After calling her supervisor, the social worker said that not only did she want to talk to all of them, she wanted to do it without the parents present. Paul refused again. So she called her supervisor again. She repeated her demand.

The Bascoms began to relent. They woke Stephen, eleven, and brought him into the living room. The social worker asked the parents to leave. They slipped around the corner and listened. How often did he watch his younger brothers and sisters?, she asked. Was he left alone with them? For how long?

The Bascoms put a stop to the interviews and sent the social worker on her way. A week later, another social worker visited the house. She was positive and respectful. She reported that there was nothing to fear in this home.

But the worst was yet to come. On July 6, the Bascoms were arrested for Anne's June 20 adventure.

There's another reason families like the Bascoms feel they are suspect: They homeschool. They have to.

"I have been dismayed at the increasing tendency of Catholic schools, private for the most part, to not offer multi-child discounts for families with many children," said Hasson, an author and frequent speaker on homeschooling. "I know of situations where couples are advised by priests or their pastors not to have more children, just so they can afford the Catholic school."

In such circumstances, large families naturally congregate into clusters of homeschooling families. They form their own organizations and create their own systems of support apart from the parish community. If the homeschoolers feel wronged by the Church community, or even if they just feel unwelcomed (they often feel both), then the character of the homeschool community won't only be a parallel Catholic universe; it will be an antagonistic one.

The irony of the situation isn't lost on large families. They're following the Church's teaching and sacrificing to do so. They don't necessarily expect an award from the Church - but they don't want to be treated like they're from Mars either.

Families complain about pews that make it impossible for children to sit still, impossible CCD schedules for large families, scowling homilists, in-convenient crying rooms, and tiny, hidden bathrooms.

The Bascoms used to be Evangelical Christians. They are Catholic now. Were the Evangelicals more open to their children? In some ways, yes. "The [Protestant] church had lots of programs for kids," Paul Bascom said. In other ways, not at all: "Doctrinally, contraception and even abortion were an option."

For Catholics, Pope John Paul II has set the right tone from the top. In his historic visit to the Italian Parliament, there were many things he could have mentioned, but he used the opportunity to ask Italians to have larger families. The Catechism makes it official: "Sacred Scripture and the Church's traditional teaching see in large families a sign of God’s blessing and the parents' generosity."

They are a blessing, to all involved. These parents are faithful parishioners: the kind that tithe, care, and provide many of the Church's vocations. The culture at large gets a lot, too: a future workforce to support the aging population, stable citizens, and the preservation of the family.

Kevin Clark of Seton Home Study School in Front Royal, Virginia, says society also gets better future parents. Clark and his wife, Laura, have seven children. "I have noticed how fascinated many children are by babies," he said. "They want to see them, want to play with them, want to hold them. It is clear that the reason for this is that the majority of children growing up today have absolutely no experience with babies in their own families. We are literally raising a generation of people in this country that has never had any association with babies."

And the gap is widening. It's astonishing how rapidly society developed the assumption that families should have only two children. Three, max. This mentality was among the first side effects of the pill.

Take your typical soccer mom, for example. If soccer is the field of dreams her Taylor and Connor have chosen, she'll use all her considerable energy and affluence to fill the soccer season with pomp and pageantry. Victories will be celebrated in restaurants. There will be uniforms and uniform accessories for every possible weather condition. The team will tote matching soccer bags. There will be an expensive gift for the coach at season's end. When you have only one child at play in the system, or two, or even three, you can keep up with the team and your checks will still clear your account. If you have four, five, or more and, consequently, a single family income, it all becomes iffy. This mismatch accounts for much of the discrimination against large families in our society. But not all discrimination is inadvertent.

Bascom listed for me the litany of comments large families hear: "When are you going to stop?" "How many are you going to have?" and "I have my two—that's enough for me! How do you do it?" Large families like to dream of ways to answer such questions. Jim Deary of Des Moines confided that his wife, Jean, mother of nine and grandmother of 23, has longed to give a mischievous answer to that last question. "First, you need a man and a woman..."

Ed Peters, a canon lawyer in Ypsilanti, Michigan, saw his dream answer become reality. His wife was confronted in a fast-food restaurant with a clerk who commented, "Are all these your kids? Haven't you guys ever heard of birth control?"

When Peters found out, he got mad. Then he got the name of the employee and "dropped everything, drove over to the place, walked past a line of about a half-dozen customers, and said, 'Where's the manager?'" He demanded an apology and later received one—in writing, along with a promised reprimand for the employee, a sincere invitation to visit the restaurant whenever the Peterses wanted, and "enough free-food coupons to feed a little army."

What I Wanted to Say is the first CD of Marie Bellet, a popular Catholic singer in Nashville, Tennessee. In the title song, the singer thinks of all the things she wanted to answer to disapproving comments in the grocery store. Big families love it. Bellet's CDs (her newest is available this spring) are the soundtrack to their family drama.

"The song lets families know they are not alone. They are in love with life and are laughed at for it," Bellet told me. "I hope it reassures them that there is no need to doubt their openness to life."

In the song, she has a profound response for the grocery store grumps. What does she say in real life when she gets comments about her family? "Usually I just giggle stupidly and roll my eyes at them and say, 'You've got to admit, they are pretty cute!' And they are."

The list of sacrifices parents of large families make could go on and on: chaos, noise, no solitude. No one invites you over for dinner. You can't fly because you'd have to buy four rows of seats. When someone says, "It's in the refrigerator," you answer, "Which one?" The sacrifices for kids? Lack of privacy, less one-on-one time with Mom and Dad, fewer trips to the movies, fewer trips to amusement parks. For teens? Potential embarrassment. As one mom put it, it's hard to arrive inconspicuously anywhere in a 15-passenger van full of kids.

Author H.W. Crocker III said it best recently in the National Catholic Register: "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers who accept the Church's teaching on contraception do not, ultimately, do so because of the unchanging tradition of the Church or the argument from natural law or any other argument, however true. Ultimately, we accept the Church's teaching because we have decided to give without counting the cost."

Let's admit it: Human nature renders even the crystal-clear logic of Humanae Vitae unpersuasive when it's read in the front seat of a crowded minivan. I should know. I'm a shockingly-young-to-have-so-many-kids Catholic. I have read papal documents in such a minivan, parked under a streetlight outside an Irish dance class.

I'm finishing this story a week after my deadline but with a new appreciation for the suffering of big families. Last week, a pestilence swept through my house. I was crouching in a steaming bathroom at 2:00 in the morning with a baby who wheezed when she breathed, while human barks rang out in the darkness outside the door and my wife hit redial over and over again downstairs, trying to wake up the doctor who was supposed to be on call. The next morning, when I regained consciousness, my house was literally strewn with bodies—pale children crouched on pillows with expressionless faces, waiting to see if the flu raging inside them would give out before they did. My wife's face was drawn and her voice was weak as she thanked me for the water I brought her. "Goodbye," I said. "I'm going to work."

But today, Dorothy, two, came downstairs beaming from ear to ear. She hid coyly behind the counter and said, "Good morning, Daddy!" in a flirtatious voice. Then Tom Sinclair, four, and I went out to breakfast, just the two of us. He called out to me in abject fear halfway across a two-story-high human gerbil tunnel in the McDonald's playground. "It's okay. I can see you," I said, and somehow, he was okay, simply because I could see him. At home, I asked Olivia, six, what she wanted to be when she grew up. "A mommy with five kids married to a man who works at the National Catholic Register," she said. I would introduce the canonization cause of Cecilia, nine, if she died tomorrow. And people say Benjamin Joseph, mere months old, looks just like me.

Together, we have years—decades—of adventure ahead of us. When I'm old, I expect my sacrifices to pay dividends. When I die, it will be the death of a patriarch. Without them, my life would be a pale sliver of what it is today.

The truth is, most large families I've met think of their life more like an amusement park than a martyrdom.

"I love the intensity," Bellet said. "I love being in over my head. Big families keep everything relentlessly real. And Catholicism is all about hard-core reality. I guess it keeps me Catholic."

She, too, is bracing for the adventure ahead. "I love how beautiful and mysterious these souls are. One of the most rewarding developments as they get older is to see how God's design plays out - the sense of humor, the sensitivity, the thinking, the noble struggle in which they will be engaged - what could be more exciting? I can't wait to see what happens next."

It's not so bad from a kid's perspective either. As novelist Bud MacFarlane Jr. told me, "I grew up with nine sisters and one brother. I think that every family is different, but for MacFarlanes, the atmosphere was always fun. Small families can have fun, sure, but big families can have big fun. It's hard to play cowboys and Indians with 1.2 children."

"People think that being in a big family means sacrificing attention, but it's just the opposite," acFarlane said. "More people in the family not only means more, and more varied, attention, but it's also a jump up on learning practical social skills like negotiation, charity, and self-reliance. In a good Catholic large family, it's all joy, really."

Mary Bascom offered the same sentiment: "The greatest joy is knowing that our kids will always have each other," she said. "If they are betrayed or hurt by friends, they aren't crushed by it; they have each other."

Or if they're betrayed or hurt by society. When we last left them, the Bascoms were set to be arrested. On July 6, the babysitter came to their house before dawn, and they drove to the station at 6 a.m. They were read their rights, fingerprinted, searched, stripped of shoelaces and belts, and locked, one after the other, in a large cage. "All of the policemen I met that morning were likeable, polite, and relaxed. They acted like what was happening to us was completely normal. It seemed very unreal," Paul said.

The Bascoms were handcuffed and put in a paddy-wagon that filled up with suspects on its way to New Haven, where it backed up into a large wire pen so that the prisoners could get out.

Then came more questions, more officers. Finally, the Bascoms were brought before the judge. "The prosecutor asked that a $20,000 bond remain in place and that the child be removed from the home," Paul told me. When the judge asked why, "He read from the police report, apparently from Officer Mulhern."

It had everything wrong, Paul said. It said he had been unaware that his daughter was missing when Anne was brought home. It said the child was "urine-soaked," a reference to her diaper, apparently. It quoted Paul saying, "I have so many children, I'm afraid sometimes I can't watch them all." Paul laughed out loud when he heard that comment read in court. "It isn't something I've ever felt, let alone said,” he told me. "Nor is it the type of statement any parent I know would make."

The judge didn't buy it either. She removed the $20,000 bond and released the Bascoms on the condition that they not send their children alone to the beach and that they appear in court on August 13. "I have wondered many times since that day in court if the way the police report was worded resulted in the high bond and the humiliation of being dragged before a judge in chains," Paul said.

Ultimately, they were not acquitted. The charges were put in a holding pattern for 13 months, during which time they can be brought up again if the Bascoms or their seven children have any more contact with the police.

They've come a long way since that June night when Anne decided to go out and explore the world.

"They assumed that someone else was watching the child because it was a large family," Sergeant Curry explained to me. "With so many kids, I'm sure kids get misplaced."

"How many kids did your family have, growing up?" I asked him, out of curiosity.

"You know what?" he laughed, "I was brought up with seven brothers. And we turned out all right."

I hate to rain on your parade but parish support for this has been evaporating for years...and for good reason.

"Evaporating for years," yes certainly. "Good reason," no, absolutely not.

It has to do with basic economics since most parishes simply do not have (and would not have) the money to educate these very much wanted children.

Parishes seem to find money for more and more "lay ministries," "social justice offices," etc. But they can't afford their primary duty. Our local parish wants to spend well over a million dollars to build a new "worship space." This goes beyond criminal. I have seen the same thing in many other parishes we have attended.

"Very much wanted" by whom? By the parents, no doubt. But not by the parish. I have known many pastors who look askance at large families as a potential burden. Also as a rebuke to their consciences since they never preach against birth control.

That being said....this Bascom family is not entirely fault-free... The Bascoms sound like a flaky and irresposible bunch to me.

There's a huge leap from "not entirely fault-free" to "flaky and irresponsible." No parents are entirely fault free. All of us are going to make mistakes. I'm sure the Bascoms regret not keeping a better eye on the 2-year old. But the tendency to jump all over parents for every mistake is a huge discouragement to parenthood in our society. We need to be charitable and supportive of fellow parents, not judgemental. If society was serious about the best interests of the children, they would be assisting large families like the Bascoms, not throwing them in jail.

It was truly heart-warming to see so many fine people respond to the article that I posted....many thanks for your succinct and warm wishes for my (impending) marriage....I've been a lurker here at Free Republic since the days when Drudge first posted the news about the "Liar-In-Chief" (Billy Boy) and his liason with....well....let's not cause a "barf alert" here....hehehehe....so, again, many thanks to y'all out there. I consider myself very blessed to be in the company of such fine, God-fearing American patriots!! - ConservativeStLouisGuy (Tom)

why not crisis? (just curious)

I used to consider Crisis to be one more useless publication bewailing the current problems in the Church without making the effort to analyze the root causes and demonstrating the courage to take action against them. Instead they have a go-along-get-along attitude towards the powers that be, whether those powers be ecclesiastical (American bishops) or secular (Pres. Bush).

There's a lot of publications that fit into that category, but Crisis crossed over the line from useless into despicable when they attempted to "shoot the messenger" with their attack on Michael Rose. Then in December they ran an article basically accusing all traditionalists (and all popes prior to Vatican II) of being anti-semites. At this point I have to consider them both dangerous and unscrupulous.

Like all Catholic publications, however, none of whom pay much (if any) money, they usually take whatever is sent to them. So a good article like this one can still be published in a worthless magazine.

why not crisis? (just curious)

One more answer: Here are some quotes from the Michael Rose article in New Oxford Review:

When Goodbye, Good Men was published, Alice von Hildebrand (who wrote the Foreword to the Aquinas edition) and Fr. Kenneth Baker, Editor of Homiletic & Pastoral Review, both warned me that I would be attacked, but I never seriously considered that the attack would come from Crisis magazine and other so-called conservative Catholic publications. The net effect of these reviews has been to draw attention away from the issues in the book and focus on the author. Unfortunately, for Crisis, Michael Rose has become the issue. In many ways this mimics what has transpired in Catholic seminaries over the past several decades. (And certainly mimics what happened in Kellenyi’s case.) Those who dare go against the status quo are singled out for particularly harsh treatment and persecuted to no end. The stock tactic is to discredit the source by calling him psychologically unfit. In this case, Crisis’s argument rests almost entirely on discrediting the primary source, Joseph Kellenyi. But if Kellenyi is not a crackpot, which he is not, then Crisis’s article entitled "A Question of Integrity" would more aptly apply to Crisis magazine itself.
Crisis magazine’s defense of a troubled and shrinking liberal seminary seems strangely out of character, and I hope it reflects a temporary lapse in judgment. The Pope has ordered a "serious" investigation of seminaries affiliated with the U.S. Church, with particular regard to dissent, homosexual cliques, and the abuse of psychological testing. Those who wish to cover up these crippling problems will no doubt brandish the Crisis article. That Crisis has been willing to do the dirty work for liberal Catholics reveals an astounding naïveté — and let’s hope we’ve seen the last of such gullibility.

But the hit piece by Sandra Miesel (in the same month that this article by Michael Rose was run in NOR) shows that we have not "seen the last of such gullibility." Apparently Crisis has set itself up as hit man against those on the right who step out of line. As Michael Rose says, "Those who dare go against the status quo are singled out for particularly harsh treatment and persecuted to no end. The stock tactic is to discredit the source by calling him psychologically unfit." This sounds exactly like the same tecnique used in the Sandra Miesel article. It will be a long time before they lose the reputation as being the supposedly "conservative" Catholic magazine that in the words of Michael Rose is "willing to do the dirty work for liberal Catholics."

Parishes seem to find money for more and more "lay ministries,"...

Very true...

Yes, It seems evident that the percentage of money, of total available to the typical parish, is increasingly going to areas of little spiritual value (as you say)...But...The amount of money flowing into parish coffers is very rapidly declining for a wide range of reasons, not the least of which is a Church leadership essentially adrift from theological truths and accepting instead avenue which are leading to the destruction of civility if not humanity...To name a few: increasing acceptance of (1)abortion...(2)homosexuality-sodomy....(3) divorce.

It is also "grinds" on many Catholics that Church leadership is taking stands in the secular world for which it has absolutelu no information...e.g. Vigorous public proclamations against attacking Iraq by a totally unimformed clergy which lacks the strategic and tactical information and intelligence essential to understanding global threats.

I see most of this reflected by changes so evident at the University of Notre Dame, of which I am an alumni.

Dear narses,

When a bishop acts sinfully, foolishly, stupidly, even criminally and in many cases, even disobediently, that doesn't make him schismatic. It doesn't make him heretical. It makes him sinful, foolish, or stupid, or criminal, or even disobedient.

It is such a stretch from the harmful actions of some bishops against Catholic education to the idea that the USCCB is schismatic. In the Archdiocese of Washington, the policies implemented that caused the wild increase in tuitions were implemented during the administration of our archdiocese by James Cardinal Hickey, a man thought by most to be highly orthodox. But, being a product of public schools in his midwestern hometown, perhaps he didn't think that Catholic schools were all that necessary to the Catholic education of children. After all, we do have CCD, don't we? I strongly disagreed with his decisions regarding our schools.

In my view, the bulk of money from Catholic giving ought to be put to the support of Catholic elementary schools, high schools, and colleges. As well, if this were the case, it is likely that the orthodoxy of at least the elementary and high schools would be increased. These schools would then rely heavily on the money coming from Catholic parishes. The power of the purse would be wielded by ordinary parish priests, and the people in the pews (usually, it is the more orthodox folks who bother to come to Mass every week and put an envelope in the basket).

But Cardinal Hickey was the bishop, not me.

I think his decisions in this regard were terribly mistaken, and did great harm to the laity of Washington. But that doesn't make him schismatic. At worst, it means that his prudential judgement failed him, and us, in Washington. That failure, if that is what it was, was counterbalanced by many good and excellent and ORTHODOX things that he did during his time as our Ordinary.

Other bishops have acted differently. A poster here tells us all to come to the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. There, the archbishops have acted wisely and prudently, and have often twisted the arms of the secular authorities to provide significant assistance to Catholic school families, thus helping to keep costs within reach of middle class families. The cardinals and archbishops of Philadelphia are to be highly praised for their actions.

But that doesn't make those who have acted stupidly or foolishly to be in schism.

sitetest

When the hierarchy acts regularly and often in opposition to Rome and to the faith, they stray from being simply "sinful, foolish, or stupid, or criminal, or even disobedient". They act in ways that show a deliberate intent, they act in concert and their results are clear. You cannot educate your children in Church schools. Many others cannot. Government schools do not produce vocations, that is a well known fact. A vocations crisis is the excuse for many of the women run parishes, and yet they closed our schools. You may be right in a cannonical law sense, but in a natural sense, the creation of a new Church in America, run by laywomen (often divorced laywomen, too often lesbians) is the end result. That reality says the Church in America has seperated itself from the Church of Rome.

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