How Soon We Forget!

Before The Spirit Keeper becomes widely available, I’d like to address an issue in the book which might cause some confusion. Katie O’Toole begins her tale by saying she is the 13th child her mother conceived, and some readers might take this to mean she is her parents’ 13th child. In fact, there is a huge difference between conception and birth, especially in 1747.

Back in those days, married women in Europe were pretty much always either pregnant or recovering from pregnancy, which is NOT to say those women had a lot of babies. If a woman did not die in childbirth (which nearly half of all women did), she could expect to have at least 25 pregnancies in her lifetime, few of which resulted in a child who survived to adulthood. The majority of pregnancies ended in miscarriage, stillbirth, or a child who died before age 11.

Of course, Katie’s mother was of hardy peasant stock, which means she was better than most at bearing live young. Though Katie was the 13th child her mother conceived, Katie had only six, five, or four older siblings, depending on what year she tallied the total (because some died along the way). Assuming her mother first became pregnant at about age 15, Katie had an equal number of younger siblings as well.

If this sounds hard to believe, then all I can say is, how soon we forget! I believe the grim details of reproduction account for much of the turmoil of European history. I also believe it behooves us to keep in mind it was only a few generations ago that all women were faced with those grim inevitable side-effects of a happy sex life: continuous pregnancy, high infant mortality rates, and a 50/50 chance that a sweet moment of unbridled passion was going to lead to an agonizing death!