Donna Baer

My story

I grew up just outside Manhattan, and attended Brown University when it was very trendy to do so. (I was there when John F. Kennedy, Jr., Bill Mondale and other glitterati graced the campus.) I met the love of my life at Brown, a strapping rugby player named Steve; we married, moved to Chicago, and became yuppies. I was made an officer in an investment-banking firm, and was poised to fall into a typical, high-achiever power-track career when I was blindsided. By a baby.

Now I don't mean that the pregnancy was unplanned and I struggled to find where the little creature would fit into my career plan. No, I mean I was completely caught off guard by how I fell head over heels in love with her. Twitterpated, dumbfounded, jaw on the floor. How could this happen to me? Suddenly, nothing mattered to me but caring for my baby, and making a wonderful home for the three of us.

When my maternity leave ended, I called my boss and said that I was not returning to work. My friends thought I was insane-- that a few weeks of being home all day with a pre-verbal sack of demands would cure me of my ailment.

But just the opposite happened. The more I cared for my daughter, the more deeply I fell in love with her. The more I created amazing meals, the more I enjoyed cooking. The better I made our hip little apartment look, the more I appreciated--dare I say the word?--housekeeping! Despite my Ivy League education and my high-powered work experience, I was becoming the very thing I had once disparaged: a homemaker! And I had never been happier.

Then it dawned on me: if one child could create so much joy, what could two children do? My husband, who had fallen in love with our little girl too, and who was a major beneficiary of my discovering the lost arts of homemaking, agreed to test the hypothesis. We discovered that the joy to child ratio varied not geometrically but logarithmically!

Of course, to validate our test results we needed to repeat the experiment, so in the space of just three years we had three children. And while moving from "man-to-man" to a zone defense required adjustments, the test results were the same: more kids = more happiness.

My husband and I are the "all-in" types. We don't do things half-heartedly and we don't phone it in. What does a couple wired this way do with the test data I've described? We pulled the goalie for good. That was it. Bring them babies on!

And did they ever come! For over twenty years straight I was pregnant, nursing, or both. We received ten children in the course of two decades, two girls and eight boys. And we are a Strong Happy Family.

www.stronghappyfamily.org