She’s in her sixties now, all the kids are adults. She spent 48 years parenting. She is a retired librarian and lives on her retirement check and occasionally free lunch programs, she raised them all on a shoestring, yard sales and beans and rice… She built a very large house on her parents rural property that she raised them all in. There is about 38 years between the oldest and youngest. The most she ever had at home at one time was 30 (which is still a hell of a lot). She adopted seven large groups of siblings, and most of them are undocumented immigrant kids who ended up in foster care. She is a single parent!

She had a blog for a while where she talked about daily life with the kids, but it wasn’t some influencer large family mommy thing, it was the blog of a little old southern lady who liked to talk about how her turnips were doing that year and how the Braves sucked. She talked a lot about her kids trauma and the challenge of raising them. I’d say about three quarters of them have done fairly well, but she openly states that she made no more difference than a foster home would have for some of her kids because they have such serious trauma.

She has over 100 grandchildren!