I'm not exactly sure when my parents got together, but they got married for real at age 21. Three years later my brother was born, then four years later I was. And so on and so forth till they had five of us. She wanted all of us, too. I guess I can't totally factor out religion, but I know she wanted kids even before getting into that shit.
I never knew her father, but I did know her mother. Thinking about it, it wouldn't have surprised me to find out that she didn't want to have kids at all. She was affectionate but never warm to her grandchildren, especially after they reached a certain age. As far as I remember, she was still a teenager when her first child was born. (My mother was born ten years later.) Maybe she was one of those women who is delighted to have a baby but when it starts to get older, is disgusted. I'm sure, also, that years of being a school teacher (second grade level) didn't really help her like kids any more.
From my mother I know that her father wanted a son, and he treated her as his son rather than another daughter. This also probably disgusted her mother. They never seemed close, and she despised my father as well. So I'm guessing that this lovely atmosphere was what made my mother want to create her own family. But it backfired on her, because you just can't give as much attention to four or five kids as you can to two or three. My older brother and I resented the situation on some level and got out as soon as we possibly could. The younger ones didn't have anything else to compare it to, though, and still live at home. So maybe she got what she wanted, after all.
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