Tammy: But not all marriages are going to be the same; it’s a world where most people of the middle and lower classes begin to marry at fifteen and sixteen and many young women marry around 18; and not everyone is going to go into marriage with a solid and sedate marriage plan or way of dealing with one another in their relationship. Some of us–most of us–make it up as we go. Remember, we haven’t seen the Contes or the Coopers in their married life before the kiddos arrived.
Also, if you look at post-war populations, marriages and childbirths skyrocket. People want to prove they’re alive; they want to prove they survived. They want to get married and they want to have children. That’s what Aly and Nawat did. They lost three people they were close to, and they were still alive. Also, they weren’t exactly counting on having three kids at once. No, Nawat didn’t do things as we think people should do them. He is what? Three years old? He’s still learning.
Tammy: A word about people getting named.
In Tortallan culture, it is considered very bad luck to name a child after someone who is still alive. In our culture, plenty of people name their children after someone who is alive or someone who has passed. I got the idea for the Tortallan/Eastern Lands bias from Quaker belief, actually. People name their children for someone who has died because there is something about that person they miss or they want to honor. This is particularly true in families that have fought in wars, like the royal family and the household at Pirate’s Swoop. The familes at Mindelan and at Trebond, with one or two exceptions, have chosen different names.
Raka belief is stricter. You may not name a child exactly for one who is passed until three generations have gone by, for fear of bad luck. You may only refer to the lost one if the name is changed to a masculine or feminine variant. Thus the names of the Crow children.
Other faiths believes different things, but I haven’t gotten to them yet.
Words of Tamora Pierce 