Mind the Gap
George Romney, "A Mother and Children (Two Studies)." Undated. From the collections of the Yale Center for British Art. To be born in the 1970s was to be slotted into a sequence—a regular, stepped pattern. My siblings and I, the neighbors, the children with whom we played, the families at our school, we all of us had our place in these arrangements.
Women back then tended to have a baby and, two years later, they had another. And perhaps another, in two years more. That magical pair of years was considered the most apt interval or breathing space between children. It was simply the way things were. Like paper dolls, we, the children, could stretch out a hand and there, right there, a sibling would be. Families were neatly ordered, in gently descending height, one following after the other, like matroyshka dolls.
I had been under the impression that, these days, families and their structures tended to be a bit looser than when I was a child, that women were able to make more choices
