Have you ever noticed that sometimes children are nothing more than little magnets for more children?
I’m here to tell you that it’s true. In fact, it seems that every time I drop one child off, I pick up two more. When I drive across town to retrieve my third child, four walk to the car. There’s no telling how many at any given time that we’ll have to take to practice, run to ball games or feed for supper.
It starts with the college-age child, who likes to bring his posse every time he returns home, and it filters down to the youngest, who emerges from the school building with children falling into line behind him as if he were the Pied Piper.
I swear that every time I walk into the kitchen there’s a brother by another mother who is buttering a bagel and wondering what’s for dinner.
It’s more than a gal can bear.
Some of these little dears are around so much that we actually forget which kids are ours. We’ve been known to chastise the wrong child for poor choices, have given advice to a kid who didn’t need it, and we once told a child who wasn’t a product of the Clinch family tree that there’d be no more PlayStation 3 until his grades were up to par.
Sometimes we gripe at the wrong kid for wearing a dirty shirt to school. Occasionally we lecture an adolescent for running around midday with a bed head, and worse yet, we once handed a $20 bill to a boy who simply stated that he was going to the mall.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s starting to get out of hand.
“We have to decide which kids are ours,” my husband stated as he eyeballed the brood at the kitchen table just the other night.
“Have at it,” I said as I looked over the homework for a child who lives three miles up the street, signed school papers for a lad with glasses and completed a crossword puzzle on the Mohicans for a youngster who may or may not be passing on the family name.
Pat thought for sure that a darling boy with blond hair had to be of the Clinch clan. But I thought his eyes looked a little different. We asked him his name, but he just shrugged. That would be alarming to some parents. But at least one other child, whom I distinctly remember giving birth to, did the same dang thing.
This kid did have my mother’s nose, and I’m quite certain that I remember buying the shirt he was wearing on a clearance rack at Wal-Mart. Yet, who’s to say?
“I think I’ll ask him to clean the toilets tomorrow,” I told Pat. “If he jumps right in and whistles while he works, I’ll know for certain that he’s not ours.”
“How will that help?” Pat asked with bewilderment.
“Because,” I answered, “the real Clinch children throw up at the prospect of touching the john, and they tend to fake leg cramps.
We both agreed that a tall kid with the ketchup-stained shirt who was sucking his soup through a straw belonged to us.
There was no pride in the conclusion, but we both agreed that he had my chin and my husband’s cousin’s disposition.
“I think the tall kid is ours as well,” Pat told me matter-of-factly.
“Just because he looks like a contender for the NBA and the All-American all-star that you always hoped for doesn’t necessarily make him ours.”
“He’s watching the Andy Griffith show like it’s his religion,” Pat said, “and he chewed me out when I switched the channel from FOX News, so he must have your father’s genes in him somewhere.”
“But he has brown eyes, and I’d swear he must be a product of a foreign descent.”
“Yeah, well, he won’t sleep unless the window is open and a fan is on, so he has your father’s genes in him somewhere. Besides that, he won’t sit with the kids, so he has to be related to your mother.”
At the end of Mass just last Sunday, a fellow parishioner tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I’ve never seen a group of boys that were so well behaved. They seem so polite, so respectful and they certainly know their prayers. Tell me, are they all yours?”
I looked down the line and was reasonably certain that no more than two of them belonged to us. Be that as it may, I smiled with pride and answered, “As near as we know.”
Lori Clinch is the mother of four sons and the author of the book “Are We There Yet?” You can reach her at www.loriclinch. com.