Blogorrhea

Actually, there are a lot of big family Lutheran blogs out there. But none of those girls seem to have the same hangups I do. They just live life with their six kids (oh, and homeschool them and make everybody's clothes and distill their own organic, cruelty-free gin) and blog blithely away, occasionally fretting cutely about the pile of shoes in the hallway. What gives? Are they:

--people who always wanted a big family?
--not originally from Sulvan households so it doesn't seem weird to them?
--just more virtuous than I am such that this considerable departure from the world doesn't bother them?
--some combination of all of these things?

Converting to CSPP was a major upheaval for me. I think I'm safely out of the initial anger zone that lasted for a few years. But when we first called off the Sulvan business, we thought we were the only people in the world who had. I felt alternatively scared to tell people that we were doing something so gauche as permanently pitching our pills, or compelled to tell them that we were doing it on a confessional basis so they wouldn't think I was one of those girls who had always dreamed about getting married and wearing stretch pants and canvas shoes while I crocheted another pair of booties with a little smile on my face. The big family people I knew didn't give the impression that they lived that way as a matter of piety rather than out of personal preference. For the most part, I still don't get that impression from them.

So I still feel lost about all this sometimes, as we don't really fit the profile of people who send the crowded Christmas pics every year. I sort of identify with them, at least in the sense that there's always a huge pile of shoes in my hallway, but there's also a part of me that wonders what our old crowd is doing, and if they just write me off as another big family crazy (although I didn't look or sound the part 6 years ago) when they hear tidings of us through the LCMS grapevine. I also wonder about the people who are probably now going through what we did when we got our paradigm shifted, because I would have appreciated having someone to talk to about it back then. Awkward times, explaining to department heads that I was switching from the thesis to the exam option because I was, *ahem*, pregnant again--but I can finally say without gritting my teeth that I don't regret it.