A few weeks ago, my nuclear family of six watched Yours, Mine and Ours, the delightful 1968 family comedy about a nuclear family of 20. In the film, Lucille Ball plays Helen North. Helen is a nurse, and a widow with eight children. Early in the film, she falls for Frank Beardsley, played by Henry Fonda. Frank is a naval officer, and a widower with 10 children. The two get married, and soon thereafter Helen is expecting. Unlike some old movies my husband and I have foisted upon our kids, this one really holds up.
The film’s novel naval backdrop makes its datedness charming and inspired, rather than stale and perplexing. Plus, between Ball’s timeless comedic genius and the enduring yet innocent hilarity attending all kinds of childhood mishaps, the humor is fresh.
My kids laughed a lot and—the true test of an impactful film-viewing experience—they were still quoting and reenacting some of the scenes with one another days later.
Yours, Mine and Ours, though, is about more than laugh lines. This late 1960’s movie has an unmistakable cultural agenda: To tug, counterculturally yet insistently, on the heartstrings of a secularizing nation in the midst of its sexual revolution by arguing through narrative for an unabashedly Catholic understanding of sex, marriage, and parenthood.
The false, nihilistic notions against which the film is militating—that love is at its purest when it is unencumbered, and that love is secondary to other attributes and goods for the raising of children—have only grown ever more influential over the years.
Hence, the film’s lessons are fresher and more relevant than ever.
Love is never free—if it’s free, it’s not love.
Towards the end of the movie, Helen’s oldest daughter, Colleen, comes to an impasse with her boyfriend, Larry, who has been calling her a prude for months because she won’t sleep with him.
She wants to turn to her mother for advice (there is little to no Catholic guilt or shame in this nevertheless very Catholic household). But Helen is in the throes of labor with her ninth (the couple’s collective nineteenth) child. So, there’s no room or time for private conversations. Frank offers his stepdaughter sage advice without theologizing or moralizing. He doesn’t need to moralize, because he is multitasking instead. The moment, as he is helping his wife down the stairs and preparing to leave for the hospital, provides the lesson more effectively than any catechism:
I’ve got a message for Larry. You tell him this is what it’s all about. This is the real happening. If you want to know what love really is, take a look around you….It’s giving life that counts. Until you’re ready for it, all the rest is just a big fraud….Life isn’t a love-in – it’s the dishes, and the orthodontist, and the shoe repairman, and ground round instead of roast beef. And I’ll tell you something else: It isn’t going to a bed with a man that proves you’re in love with him; it’s getting up in the morning and facing the drab, miserable, wonderful everyday world with him that counts….I suppose having nineteen kids is carrying it a bit too far – but if we had it to do over, who would we skip? You?
Talk about “the talk.”
There is no scandalized shaming, and no angry prohibition. There is, instead, an elegant repudiation of “free love”—as idea, as practice, and as ideal. The reason to wait is not just that Colleen could get pregnant, or have her heart broken, or develop what, in 1968, would still have been “a reputation.”
It is something much simpler and more profound: That the very idea of love and sex as something separate from family and life is a lie.
The notion that true love is individualistic and carefree, while family life brings responsibilities that dim and diminish that love, is today near universal. Even among those who get married (let alone among the many who do not). Increasing numbers of young people see having children at all as a mere lifestyle preference without obvious or universal value. Meanwhile, many young (and not so young) people see having more than one or two children as an enigmatic idiosyncrasy at best and a climatological sin at worst.
Yours, Mine and Ours was released in April 1968. Humanae Vitae would not be published until June of that year. The encyclical was, of course, prophetic. But the film embodies the peril of divorcing not just sex from marriage but also love from responsibility as no mere document could do.
Sex and marriage will not be broadly reunited in the West. We have reliable birth control, and that’s that. But many couples, especially those past their teens, do not want just sex; they also want love, companionship, and social status as a pair.
Hence, the primary (and well ahead of its time) insight of Yours, Mine and Ours is that love, if it is claimed in “freedom from” familial responsibility, is not the real thing. In the absence of the very familial, communal, and societal responsibilities that are commonly seen as dimming its ardor, “true love” is counterfeit.
Because the truest love looks outward, to a life filled with as much chosen obligation to others as a given couple can handle. Beginning, in most cases, with children. But not ending with them: Helen encourages Frank to go away for six weeks to complete a naval project, even though that means leaving her at home, pregnant, with 18 children and a job of her own. Charity, ambition, and love begin at home; but they do not end there.
Love does not conquer all—but it does conquer a lot.
At the end of the film, Frank and Helen legally adopt one another’s children. The judge asks Helen how she manages a household with 19 kids.
Per the judge: There’s been great fear expressed by many people that no one woman can give this large number of children sufficient attention and affection to allow them to grow up in a healthy atmosphere. But in this court’s investigation of your home, the reverse seems to be true. All the children seem to be happy, well-fed and normal, the house amazingly clean and in good order. My wife has two children, one poodle and a full-time maid and can’t seem to manage anything. What is your secret?
Helen responds: Well, sir, a great deal of love, a little discipline, and a husband who doesn’t criticize.
The “less is more” parenting wisdom on offer here has never been more relevant. In an era of helicopter parenting that reduces kids’ independence, therapeutic parenting that demands endless rumination over the individual’s feelings, and gentle parenting that eschews the good of basic discipline, it would behoove most of us to realize that we would parent better if we had more kids, not the other way around.
Not just because practice makes closer to perfect (though it does). And not just because kids help and entertain one another so that not everything is on parents’ shoulders (though this is true as well). But mostly because what our kids need most is for us to make clear we love them beyond all measure, to set up rules and schedules that allow the family to run efficiently while also building their work and domestic habits—and then to get out of their way.
I acknowledge, for example, that it would probably take 19 kids under my roof for me to neglect my firstborn to the extent that would be optimal for his development. His younger brothers are more fortunate (my fondness for, and unwitting imitation of, naval officer Frank’s militarized bedroom, bathroom, and chore schedule notwithstanding).
No, not every couple can or should have several children. That has always been true. Nevertheless, when society as a whole loses as its center of gravity a not-so-distant reality in which people with three or four kids are the norm and people with six or seven are not uncommon, it loses something deeper and more immeasurable than population. It loses a widespread perspective about what is really important.
Ever wonder why we spend so much of our time—socially, intellectually, politically—on nonsense? One guess, inspired by Yours, Mine and Ours: Too many of us have too few kids.
I hope that my own children gleaned more than laughs from Yours, Mine and Ours. My husband and I sure did. We’ll plan to show them this unique film again, when they are old enough to more fully understand this pro-natalist critique that uses exaggeration to excellent effect.
Of course, a “the more the merrier” family is beyond what most parents—my husband and me included—are set up to handle. But its spirit is instructive, nonetheless. As the anti-natalist, anti-child, anti-family mainstream culture becomes ever more extreme and wide-reaching, hedging in response will become less and less useful.
Sometimes, the hyperbole is the point.
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