Thursday, July 31, 2008
Barbara Curtis, 60, has 12 children ages 8 to 38. She's a professional writer who has published nine books, a Montessori-trained teacher and author of the blog "Mommy Life." Curtis, who is moving soon from Waterford to Bluemont, spoke with loudounextra.com staff writer Rachael Dickson about her writing career, how her political views have changed and how she became the mother of four boys with Down syndrome.
Q How did you come to live in Loudoun County?
AWe settled in Loudoun in 2002. . . . I think Virginia was really ingrained in me because my high school years were spent growing up here. I moved to California in 1972 as a radical hippie. And I lived in California for 30 years. Northern California is physically very beautiful, but I really missed the family traditional spirit, because by then I had changed and begun to appreciate that more than I did when I was younger.
How and why did you start writing?
I was 46 years old when I started on a career path to professional writing. . . . I was home-schooling my kids. We were having babies every year and a half, and people were asking, "Well, how can you handle having all these kids and toddlers and home-schooling all these different levels?" I realized that there were things that I knew as a Montessori teacher that were very helpful to me as a mom, and I wanted to share those with other mothers. I started having workshops where I lived, and then I decided I wanted to write a book about it. I went to a Christian writers' conference, and that's where I learned how to be a professional writer.
. . . All of my books have something to do with parenting except one book, "Reaching the Left from the Right: Talking About Controversial Issues with People That Don't Think Like You." That's because I was a radical hippie, leftist, hate-America stereotype, and I changed. I'm very concerned with how polarized things are -- how people get misrepresented. I feel especially sad about the way that conservatives are misrepresented by the media and in people's thinking.
I think about abortion as a representative issue. I had an abortion before I became a Christian. It was like going to the dentist for me, because I didn't grow up with any idea that my life was special or sacred. How in the world would I think that a baby's life was special or sacred? Sometimes people don't understand that when you grow up without any kind of spiritual foundation, you have a lot different view of the world. This was my effort to explain things from my experience and philosophy.
You write a lot about your political and moral viewpoints and how they have changed over the years. Can you tell us more about that transformation?
My father left when I was 6 years old and threw my mother in a complete tailspin. Divorce was unusual back then. I grew up with foster homes, an alcoholic, negligent mom with multiple relationships with men, and poverty.
For me, the way out, I instinctively realized, was through education. I went to O'Connell High School [in Arlington County]. . . . I credit them with really, seriously saving my life.
During my young adulthood, there were two things weaving themselves through. One was this desire to be very positive . . . but the second one was the self-destruction that came from the alcoholism and drugs that I took to kind of escape from the stuff I was dealing with from my past.
I moved to San Francisco in '72, divorced my husband, was a single mom with two daughters, really went down the tubes as a drug addict and a drug dealer. Then in 1980, that was when I started to change, because I got sober through AA, met my husband [Tripp], got married, started having more babies, looked for a spiritual path, exploring Eastern religion. I became a Christian in '87.
You have four sons with Down syndrome. How has that experience changed your life and outlook on the world?
[Jonny] was my eighth child. I knew enough about kids with Down syndrome that I knew it was going to be a wonderful adventure. Then we decided to adopt a baby with Down syndrome.
In the meantime, a couple had come to us who had gotten a prenatal diagnosis for their second baby that he would have Down syndrome. The mom wanted to get an abortion, and the father had been raised Catholic so he didn't [want her to]. They came to us just to get some informal counseling, and they ended up asking us to adopt their baby. That was the compromise -- that she would carry the baby if we would adopt him. Daniel was born on Mother's Day.
So here we were, with four kids under the age of 4 and three of them had Down syndrome. . . . Then in 2000, Catholic Charities called and asked, "Would you maybe be willing to adopt another baby?" I said, "No way. I'm exhausted, I'm 52 years old and I'm sorry."
I got off the phone, and my daughter Sophia, who was 12 at the time, had heard me. She said, "Mom, I can't believe that you would ever say no. That's not who I thought you were. And besides, we can adopt. Then we can be dirtier by the dozen." She was mixing up "Dirty Dozen" and "Cheaper by the Dozen."
This family came over, and they were from Taiwan. They were on student visas . . . and the mom really loved [Justin]. They wanted to go home to Taiwan, but they didn't want to take him, because they'd been here long enough that they could see that we honor people with disabilities and take care of them and offer them education and everything, which they would never do in Taiwan. They had interviewed 20 families and had not liked any of them, but they liked our family because they said our children were respectful and kind to each other.
I think back and think, wow, normal people would have thought, well, what is this going to look like in 10 years? And they probably would have said no. But Tripp and I aren't like that. We're kind of like risk takers that are like, "Oh, sure, we can handle this."
What's rewarding about having 12 kids?
What's so great for me is all the activity: to go to this one's game or this one's rehearsal. It's fun. When you have your little children, you tend to be exhausted. But it's so wonderful when they grow up. . . . My son who's 20, he's gotten into making CDs for me lately. He's into indie music, and I love it because I would not know these beautiful songs and these wonderful things if I didn't have a son who was turning me on to that.
The downside is . . . it is expensive. We've sacrificed a lot. We never drove fancy cars or took the expensive vacations or anything. We don't have the plasma TV. Where we chose to put our resources was into our kids.
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