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The Last Kraus: One family, 10 HHS grads over 22 years

Meredith Kraus, right, shown at sister Judith's wedding, graduates from Hendersonville High School on June 9.

By Bill Moss, Published: June 9, 2017

Part 4: ‘No, we are not Catholic’

When No. 10 Meredith was 8 years old, the editor of the Times-News sent his best reporter to the Kraus family’s home to interview Kathleen for a “Got a Minute” interview, to be published on Mother’s Day. The editor knew the family. “I think they’ve got a good enough sense of humor to handle this,” he told the reporter. “The first question is, ‘Are they Catholic and do they know where babies come from?’”

“No, we are not Catholic and we are not Mormons,” Kathleen told the reporter. “We are good Baptists and we just decided to have 10 because we didn’t want 11.”

Friends, coworkers and new acquaintances often ask why Kathleen and Ken had so many children.

“They usually phrase it in a much more gentle way,” Kathleen said. “‘Did you want to have a big family? … Wow, are they all yours?’”

Some reactions were less subtle. They’ll never forget the time the wife of one of Ken’s bandmates said, “What are you, some kind of sex maniac?”

Kathleen plays trumpet and Matthew (center) and Ken play trombone in the orchestra at First Baptist Church.Having 10 children was not based on a calculation of what they could afford. If they had considered that they would have stopped at two. “Money should never be the reason why you don’t do what you love,” Kathleen said. Nor was it about wanting two full basketball teams or a brass and woodwind ensemble — although the family could form one with 12 pieces.

“It just so happens we never had difficulty having children,” Kathleen said. “I never had difficulty carrying them and I never had difficulty birthing them. And apart from just (my) being uncomfortable during pregnancy, we just loved them.

“We loved bringing new babies into the family. We loved the reaction of our older children to a new baby. They never said, ‘Oh man, not another one. Where am I going to sleep?’ Nobody ever said anything like that.”

As newlyweds, the couple didn’t plan on having more children right away. Kathleen already had Justin and knew she wanted more children. Although she was now married, her parents’ condemnation of her first pregnancy hovered like a dark cloud.

“I had gotten on birth control when we first got married because we didn’t want to just jump right in,” she said. “I had such a negative reaction to the hormonal change that I abandoned that very quickly and so became pregnant very quickly also.”

Their first biological child together, Ellen, was born Oct. 17, 1983, 11 months after their wedding. A big brother at age 3, Justin faced competition from this lively new addition with a head full of thick curls. Justin told his mother he wanted to have curly hair.

Ken loved Kathleen’s response.
“She said, ‘You have straight hair. You’re just fine. She has curly hair and she’s just fine. But she’s younger so she’s going to get the attention now but we love you every bit as much.’ You’d have to talk to the kids to see if any of that works but that’s what we always tried to do,” he said.

As the family grew, Mom and Dad tried to make sure they treated each child the same.

“We told the kids, ‘You’re my favorite 12-year-old. You’re my favorite 8-year-old. You’re my favorite whatever age you are,’” Kathleen said. “We still say that.”

* * * * *

The children’s names had biblical references or some other meaning. Justin got his name because he would be “just and upright.”

“We had these names picked out pretty much before they were born,” Kathleen said.

“Except for Sarah,” Ken added. “It was going to be Gordon Frank. And then Gordon Frank came out and she was a girl.”

The family that prays together ... at the Kraus home on Easter Sunday.No. 4 was named for King David and Uriah, the husband of Bathsheba. In the Bible, David sends Uriah to his death in battle so he can have Bathsheba to himself.

“You trust God in these things,” Kathleen said. “So to put Uriah with David was kind of a weird thing for us but we really felt like that was what we were supposed to do. We prayed about it, we felt at peace and at some point you just have to go with what you trust.”

Ellen recalled that the Kraus children, who know their Bible because of their upbringing and Sunday school, thought the pairing was awkward.

“We always thought it was it was interesting that in the Bible, David kills Uriah,” she said. “So his middle name killed his first name.”

There’s more than one opinion of how much David enjoyed his first name.

“He loves it,” Ken says. “He think it’s a cool name.”

“He really didn’t like being called Uriah,” Ellen said. “We never called him Uriah. Matter of fact, whenever he would have a substitute teacher, he always went straight to the roll and crossed out Uriah and wrote in big letters, DAVID.”

* * * * *

After the birth of David in February 1987, Kathleen got pregnant again and had a miscarriage.

“I guess at that time I was 32,” she said. “I began to wonder if I’m a shutting down. I prayed and asked God not to let that be the end. I wanted to be able to have more. (In the Bible,) Hannah asked God for Samuel. He’s the only one I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt — his name was Samuel Edward.”

The naming of Samuel had created another Christian connection. The names formed an acrostic: JESUS.

“After Sarah was born and we were pregnant again we hadn’t even noticed,” Ken said. “It’s almost impossible to write about our family and leave the church and leave God out of it. The Lord was a part of our family. Some of our children went to the pediatrician twice in their lives.”

“Then people said, ‘What are you gonna do, ‘Jesus Saves’? Because the next one was Stephen.” The acrostic ended. Judith was named for an elegant Frenchwoman from church with a beautiful accent that they loved.

By the time she got to No. 7, Kathleen was eager to shed the rules, machines and commotion of a hospital delivery room. Attended by Ken and a midwife, she had Judith, Thomas and Matthew at home.

“When I had Thomas I could have crawled into a closet and birthed him myself,” she said. “I did not want anybody there. That’s the beauty of having so many. By the time you get to the end of it, you know exactly what you’re doing, you know exactly what’s happening. There’s no fear and there’s no anxiety because you’ve done this before. You can read your body because it’s telling you things and you become aware of what it’s saying.”

* * * * *

“A year after Thomas was born she got pregnant and miscarried on Christmas Eve,” Ken said. “What we should have done is go to the hospital.”

Kathleen would not allow it.

The miscarriage resulted in a longer gap than usual — three years and one month — between No. 8 and No. 9. Kathleen felt she might be near the end of having children. But she got pregnant again and had high hopes for this next one.

“She had decided that the baby’s name was Meredith Hope,” Ken said. “She was absolutely sure it was a girl.”

She also thought she might be pregnant with twins. “We had an ultrasound because I was very large. … We came home and I cried because I wanted another girl,” she said. “We had more boys than girls. I loved the name Meredith Hope. I just had to have a Meredith Hope. And when I found out that Matthew was going to be a boy I felt bad because I had not accepted him as a boy.”

Days later, Kathleen and Ken took the children to Mr. Gatti’s pizza restaurant on South Main Street, where kids ate free. “I said to her at the salad bar, ‘His name’s Matthew,’” Ken said. “We needed to know this so she could grieve for the baby that died.” Matthew means “gift from God.”

On Dec. 23, 1996, almost exactly two years after the Christmas Eve miscarriage, Kathleen delivered Matthew in her bedroom with his brothers and sisters watching. He was big baby — 10 pounds, 7 ounces. Ellen, who was 13 at the time, describes the scene as the most meaningful memory of her childhood.

“I got to carry Matthew to the bathroom,” she said. “I helped clean him up after he was born. It’s the one (memory) that sticks in there the most. It’s the miracle of life.”

* * * * *

Kathleen had endured two miscarriages and had plenty of children to raise, all still in the house. She felt she was at a turning point.
“I had embraced the fact that I wasn’t going to get my Meredith Hope,” she said. “I got my Matthew and I was going to let go of my Meredith.”
She had nine children, ages one to 17. Although it was no candidate for a Town & Country photo spread, the family home at 202 Buncombe Street was filled with joy and love. The children were fine. Ken adored her and made her laugh. Still, a sense of despair started to come over her. She was 40. Yet she was overwhelmed — from home schooling, cooking, cleaning, mothering. Worst of all, her past was gaining on her.

“I would say it was an awakening,” she said of her response to an emotional crisis. “I saw that the patterns and the habits and mindset that I grew up with were going to get passed along to my children. Some people make adjustments to the pattern but a lot of that stuff comes through — the way you view things, your worldview, the things that are important. A lot of those come from your parents whether you like it or not. When I began to see myself in the children and I didn’t like what I was seeing, I started to feel incredibly hopeless and very inefficient and insignificant.”

Through prayer and introspection, she acknowledged and accepted the painful parts of her past. The way her mother heaped praise on her brother James because he was gifted at making beautiful shapes from clay. The way she “didn’t have some big thing going on in my life like my brother James with his art that could get her attention.” The way her father never praised her. The way no one sat beside her in the church pew. The way she felt different because her girlfriends’ parents slept in the same room.

Kathleen needed to see that those things were not her fault. She recast them not as a birthright to pass on but a demon to exorcise.

“I didn’t examine myself,” she said. “I felt like God examined me. I felt like He opened me up and showed me what was there — things that I never had any idea. I realized I had a need for inner healing. I was damaged. I needed that healing to know that my perspective would not be skewed when I dealt with my own children.”

Kathleen and MeredithAlthough she had reconciled with her mother years earlier, the two still had their differences. By the time her mother reached age 85, she told Ken, “I’ve decided she can do no wrong.”

In a circuitous path, hope rescued her from depression.

For once, she and Ken did something for themselves and for one another. In February of 1998, they joined a weight-loss group at their church, First Baptist. Kathleen lost 17 pounds and Ken lost 36.

“I felt good, I looked good, I didn’t want to be pregnant again,” she said. “But it didn’t work out that way.”

Ken had made an appointment for a vasectomy. They had agreed. Their baby days were over. Then “a God thing” thing happened.

Ken was examined at the doctor’s office. “They told me you have an infection. ‘You can’t do it.’ So I went on antibiotics to clear it up and then have it after,” he said. “In the meantime, she turned up pregnant, had a miscarriage and two weeks later — I don’t know what we were thinking — she was pregnant again.”

The “God thing” was about to add one more child to the brood — and answer Kathleen’s prayer. She had prayed for Meredith Hope before No. 9 was born. She thought the answer was no. It wasn’t. The answer was next time.

She had Meredith Hope, an answered prayer.

Part 5: The border collie and the mother duck

Ken and Kathleen couldn’t afford to take the children out to eat very often. When they did, they did not tolerate disruption. “The rule was very simple,” Ken said. “If you don’t behave, we’re not going to stay.”

The family always needed more than one table. One night at the Golden Corral there were no adjoining tables, and Ken and Kathleen and a baby got seated away from the rest of the children. A waiter marveled at how the table full of children, from toddler to young teen, behaved so well. He asked Justin, the oldest, how that could be. “He told him, ‘Because we want to go out again,’” Ken said.

The Kraus grandchildren load up at Easter dinner.In child-rearing, Ken was the authoritarian, Kathleen the shopper, cook and organizer.

“He’s been the trainer and I’ve been the manager,” she said.

“If we were to really say what are the biggest issues among ourselves, it would probably come down to how we handle the children,” Ken said. “She was like a mother duck. She would do what she was doing and the kids would follow behind. I was like a border collie. I was behind them. All the kids would line up along the van. I was a little bit afraid of one of the young ones running out and getting hit by a car in the parking lot at church. We paired up — big and little, big and little, big and little.”

* * * * *

In the earliest years of childrearing, when the kids were the youngest, Kathleen felt blessed to have help from Ken’s mother, Frances.

“She would come and clean house, made beds, changed sheets, did laundry,” Kathleen recalled. “I could go to the grocery store without the kids. She was amazing. Never, never intruded into our personal business. She was the best teacher, just by observation, of how to be a mother-in-law that I’ve ever seen. She would make suggestions. She would say, ‘This is what worked for me.’”

As helpful as that was, there was too much work around-the-clock for just one woman, especially one who was home-schooling six children while looking after a toddler and an infant. The siblings had to pitch in.
“I remember mom being pregnant and telling me to go down to the kitchen and make dinner for everybody,” said No. 1 Justin. “The older children were supplemental caregivers. … (Mom) was pregnant most of my life.”

“Sarah’s like a second mother,” Ken said. “Sarah and Ellen dressed a lot of babies. Sarah was a little more into it than Ellen. Stephen called her Bomba. Even to this day they’re very close. If I want to know what’s going on with Stephen, I’ll call Sarah. He’ll tell her before he’ll tell us.”

Ellen SandersEllen, No. 2, was pressed into almost full-time service as a nanny to her younger siblings.

“Being the oldest girl, I learned to change diapers, I think I was 5 or 6. I can’t remember not having a baby on my hip,” she said. “I learned how to cook at an early age. I learned how to make things from scratch. Biscuits, macaroni and cheese I learned at 9 or 10, and laundry. You name it, I did it, except for paying bills and breast feeding. It was a lot of responsibility. … My sister Sarah and I were really close. We shared a room, we were tight and still are.”

Sarah, No. 3, loved mothering the younger siblings.

“It was loud and busy but you always had somebody around and that was nice,” she said. “For me, I was like a little mother hen. I got to play with the babies. That was my childhood, taking care of my siblings and basically playing house, real life. I didn’t mind it. I didn’t know any different. I had a happy childhood.”

* * * * *

When they look back on raising the children, especially when Matthew, No. 9, was a baby and nine children remained at home, the Krauses see mostly a blur.

“I wonder how we did it,” Ken said. “We didn’t let our children slow us down. If we were driving and the baby needed to nurse, she would just pull the baby out of the seat and nurse the baby.

“We had difficulty getting all the car seats in and out, and when they got old enough to sit up, we stuck ‘em in their regular seatbelts. David was 2 years old when we put him in the seatbelt. You used to be able to leave the kids in the car and run into the grocery store.”

Kathleen drove the kids to school in a big blue van known as the Krausmobile. Schoolmates watched them all pile out.

“They thought we were in a group home,” Sarah said.

Ken and Kathleen tried to sustain their Sunday tradition of time together, without the kids. The idea came from Ken’s father.

“He suggested when we first got married that I get Kathleen out of the house one night a week,” he said. “We had our little haunts. Western Sizzlin’ had a steak-for-two meal — because we were penny pinching the whole way.”

Ken learned the hard way that Kathleen felt very strongly about Christmas and tradition.

“At Christmastime when I was growing up, Mom never wrapped anything decently,” Kathleen said. “She wrapped in white tissue paper and she wrote my name on it and of course the pen poked through the tissue paper and I could see what’s in there.”

“Her tradition was that you put a pillowcase out to show that Santa had come. We’d each get into our pillowcases and open our stuff, all at the same time, and it would be over with, and it was very, very disappointing.”

* * * * *

Ken suffered Kathleen’s wrath when he inadvertently reignited those unpleasant memories.

As a joke on their first Christmas, he wrapped her gift in newsprint with a necktie as a bow.

“That hit a nerve in me. Oh, I ripped his face off for it. I said, ‘Don’t you ever give me a present wrapped up like that. In the history of the world, don’t ever give me a present like that!’ Because I had grown up like that.
“I’m meticulous about gift wrapping, to this day. I make sure that all my children have a nicely wrapped gift. I don’t put things in gift bags.”

Christmas tradition remains strong in the Kraus house and strictly policed by Kathleen.

“My mom has worked very hard to make sure everybody gets the same thing,” Ellen said. “At Christmas everybody would get the same amount of candy, the same color wrapper. She went above and beyond to make sure it was just right.”

Family tradition remained the same.

No one could get to the gifts until they were all awake. They sat on the staircase and posed for a family photo. Then they sat on the couch in the family room and got another picture made. Kathleen slid a sheet of Pillsbury cinnamon buns in the oven and frosted them when they came out piping hot. The aroma filled the house. It smelled like Christmas. The grown Kraus kids with children carry on the cinnamon bun tradition today.

* * * * *

Ken and Kathleen always had a plan to save up for Christmas or to put Christmas on a credit card and pay it off in the spring. With 10 dependents, they counted on a sizable income tax refund to pay off Christmas.

“One year, it wasn’t working,” Ken said. “For whatever reason we were having difficulty keeping up and we weren’t going to be able to have Christmas.”

Christmas meant so much to Kathleen. She was all about making good memories for her children, not memories like hers.

“She brought it up in Sunday school that she wasn’t going to be able to give her children gifts that year and that really upset her,” Ken said. “Long story short, the teacher of our Sunday school showed up at our front door and handed us an envelope. It was all cash. Nineteen-hundred dollars.”

They were overwhelmed. A scene from a Hallmark Channel movie had saved Christmas.

“We got what were supposed to,” Ken said. “We got a television. We got toys. We spent it on the kids. It’s one of the many stories that we have about how God provided for us.”

Another lesson reinforced the Biblical guide about grace through faith and not works. The Krauses always tithed until one year they could not.

“What God taught us was, we didn’t tithe for an entire year and God provided anyway and what we learned was it didn’t matter,” Ken said. “There was not a magic formula. And that’s what I tried to teach my children. There is no magic formula. You need to live your life understanding who you are and who God is and who’s in control, get your values right, get your priorities straight, pay your bills and God will take care of you.”

The Kraus children, especially the older ones with children of their own, understand and appreciate the sacrifices their parents made, the love they shared, their fairness and honesty.

“When you have two kids it’s stressful,” Ellen said. “But you have 10? You talk about selfless. That’s my mom and dad.”