And I’ve not met many men with 10 kids who are super into doing the whole “dividing the labor of parenting evenly” thing, and I went to catholic schools, I knew some big families. And even if he had been the type to do that, you aren’t winding up being the breadwinner for a family with 10 kids and having both low stress finances and a low stress job. So adding in lots of extra home duties and possibly reduced financial capabilities and mourning will probably wreck you.

That said, I’ve never met a family that large where the parents kept actually parenting beyond number 3 or 4. Some of the most horrifically parentified people I ever met were middle daughters of large families. Also the kids are struggling too, and each of them is likely to have taken some lasting psychic damage from being abandoned by their dad, even temporarily, shortly after their mom died.