Family Matters

Variety, it's said, is the spice of life.

I don't know about that, but there is certainly variety when it comes to what makes up a "normal" family around the world.  I've got 5 wonderful kids, ages ranging from 30 down to 3, in two countries and by two different (but lovely) ladies and it's fair to say that's 4 more kids than I expected to have when I started out in life.  But it's what I would certainly call a "normal" family - none of them are nuts, axe murderers, politicians or lawyers (at least not yet) so there is absolutely no reason to dislike them - quite the opposite in fact, they're great kids. 

When I was a kid there were two families living next door to each other at the end of my road who, between them, had getting on for 30 kids.......whether you would call that normal, even back then when big families were very common, is open to debate, but as far as they were concerned there was nothing odd about it (which is after all a definition of normal).  In the same road there were at least a couple of other families with half a dozen kids each, so I had plenty of playmates. 

There weren't so many families around then with only a single child, and I can't think of many that stopped at 2 (my then best mate Nick and his sister Shelley being the exceptions).....at least in my part of England.  That was true right through to the 80s, I think, when careers started taking over from raising kids as an aspirational future for women, and then you started increasingly getting one kid families - not only in England but world-wide.  Having more than one was even prohibited in China (still is in fact) to prevent over-population.  Bit different in another madly populous country, India, where multiple kid families are the norm.  Then of course in Muslim countries, where polygamy is acceptable, there are families with multiple kids from multiple wives - and that's "normal" too.

So it's probably fair to say that a "normal" family is pretty much whatever you feel comforatable with and is acceptable to the society in which you happen to live.

But I saw something on BBC World News the other night that could, surely, never be considered remotely "normal".  It was about an old Nigerian cleric (Muslim of course) in his 70s, and a sprightly, sparkly eyed old sod he was too.  And no wonder - living in a big rambling old house, he is married to 90 (that's NINETY) wives and has 250 - odd children: it would have been over 300 but 50 or so sadly died in infancy.  They all seemed happy enough: wives sitting around chatting and laughing while they breast-fed their babies (the old fella is still banging them out quite happily - certainly no jaffa there) while others did the cooking, laundry and whatever else.  The local Muslim hierarchy are up in arms, insisting that in the Koran it clearly states that only the Prophet Mohamed can have more than 4 wives, but the old stud denies this and in any case insists that he's only doing exactly what God told him to do when appearing to him in a vision some years ago.  He's even planning to continue marrying and banging out more kids - at least another 10 wives he reckons, "maybe more" - and he laughed and shrugged his shoulders - "God's will!"

The bloke, whilst appearing very happy indeed, is clearly nuts - just think about it: all those mothers-in-law!  All that PMT......

Variety?  Insanity, more like!