I’m the fourteenth of twenty-two children. All biological. Fourteen boys, eight girls. When I say that out loud, I can feel people doing the math in their heads—trying to picture it, trying to understand how something like that even functions. Most people don’t grow up in a family; they grow up in a household. I grew up in something closer to a small, loud, moving ecosystem.
I was born when my mom was in her mid-40s. She had her first child at 20 and her last at 48. That means for most of my life, my mother was either pregnant or nursing. Nearly three decades of her body being in service to another human being.
She had miscarriages along the way—five of them, including one pregnancy that ended with triplets at around eleven weeks. But she kept going. Not because she didn’t know how hard it was, but because my parents always wanted a large family. And they got one.
Growing up, our house was big on paper and small in reality: six bedrooms, four bathrooms. I shared a bedroom with anywhere from five to seven brothers depending on who had moved out and who was still home. When I was little, I even shared a bed with two of them.
Mornings were chaos. Lines for the bathroom. Hot water was a luxury. If someone got sick, it was a logistical nightmare. You learned patience fast, or you learned to function without it.
Meals were an operation. Dinner every night meant one long table that seated eighteen, plus a smaller table for the youngest kids. Groceries came from Costco, always in bulk. Laundry required four industrial-size washers and dryers. Nothing about our life was scaled for convenience—it was scaled for volume.
And yet, somehow, it worked.
My parents ran a successful contracting and construction business. At their peak, they were bringing in $250,000 to $350,000 a year. That sounds like a lot until you divide it by the number of mouths they were feeding, clothing, and eventually sending to college. But not all twenty-two of us were ever home at the same time. As younger kids were born, older siblings were moving out, getting jobs, going to school. The load shifted constantly.
Despite the numbers, my parents were present. That surprises people. There’s this assumption that in families this big, the older kids raise the younger ones. We helped, of course—we had chores, we pitched in—but we weren’t parentified. My parents knew what was going on in our lives. They showed up to games. They cared about school. They knew us individually as much as humanly possible.
We’re Mormon, and yes, that shaped everything. Most of us stayed in the faith. Most of us married within it. Large families are normal where we grew up in Northern Utah—but even there, ours stood out. At school, everyone knew who we were simply because of the sheer number of us.
Holidays are still something else entirely. My parents hosted sixty people for Thanksgiving this year. Christmas is shaping up to be around 140 or 150. They’ve since moved to an acreage, which helps.
Cooking becomes a team sport—twenty-plus people in the kitchen at once. We have family spreadsheets now. Birthdays, anniversaries, grandchildren. My parents have eighty-four grandkids so far, with more on the way. You can’t keep track of that many lives without systems.
People ask if we’re close. The answer is yes—but not in a storybook way. I’m closest to the siblings near my age, naturally. The age gaps are huge. Some of my nieces and nephews are older than my youngest siblings. That’s just how the math works out when your parents are still having kids while some of your siblings are already married with children of their own.
Was it loud? Constantly. Was there ever privacy? Rarely. Were there moments where it felt overwhelming? Absolutely. But there was always someone to talk to. Always something happening. You were never alone unless you actively tried to be.
When people ask me what the most unforgettable moment was, I always think of one Sunday at church when all twenty-two of us managed to squeeze onto a single pew. It was uncomfortable, ridiculous, and kind of perfect. That image sums it up better than any explanation ever could.
I know people wonder about my mom—about the toll it must have taken on her body, her mental health, her sense of self. I can only speak from what I saw. She’s healthy. She works out every day with my dad. She accepted menopause without falling apart. I don’t pretend to know what she carried quietly or what she never said out loud. I just know she’s one of the strongest people I’ve ever known.
Growing up this way doesn’t feel normal when you explain it to outsiders—but when it’s your life, it just is. Messy, crowded, exhausting, joyful. A family so large it becomes its own weather system. And somehow, improbably, it all held together.