posted by Lyle (still haven’t forgotten that bit)
Updated and edited 10/10/03
As Mike pointed out in his introduction, I’m the only one of this week’s guest bloggers who’s childless. I’ve been thinking about this kind of appelation all week now, and trying to write this on and off all day – I think we’re on revision 4.2 5.3 now.
So yes, as yet I haven’t scared the world by putting forward offspring. I haven’t found anyone who’d be psychotic enough to want kids with me either. That’s fine – and completely understandable. I’ve helped bring up the brats children of friends etc., although obviously that’s no real comparison with the real thing.
Do I want children? Yeah, at some point. I know it’d turn my life upside-down, and I don’t know completely how well I’d cope with that – but I’d want to do it. Would I have done it ten years ago (as a random figure)? Probably not. I might have wanted to, but I’m 99% sure it would never have worked out properly. I’m too bloody independent – well, I always way, and to some degree I still am. I just laughingly think I handle it in a slightly more mature way now.
All the people who know me out in reality tend to agree that I’d be a good parent – personally, I suspect that’s because my mental age isn’t much different to a childs anyway, and that always helps in the grand scheme of things. Oscar Wilde said “Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.” – and there’s more truth in that than most people care to admit. We all have our own idiosyncracies, and when children are involved too, then those idiosyncracies can be passed on. Phillip Larkin’s observation, “They f**k you up, your mum and dad” was also spot-on, but there should’ve been the proviso there – “they do it with the best intentions“. I spent a long time disagreeing with my own parents about their ways of dragging me up – yet more and more I find it harder to pick fault, because (without wanting to sound like a big-headed twerd) I think that in general I’ve turned out OK. Seeing some of the denizens of things like C4’s “Wife Swap“, they definitely could’ve done a lot worse than the way I ended up.
Of course, as Jann observed in his “joys of parenthood” everyone knows “their child will be perfect” while it’s all a theoretical exercise. It’s only when they become reality that the chuff-ups are there, and legion.
When it comes to the joys of sproglets, I’m kind of stuck for an answer – maybe one day I’ll find one. In the meantime, I’m going to post this up, and probably come back to it and edit it in the morning, because I know I’m gibbering like a gibbon. Joy. But there’ll be at least one corollary post to this tomorrow. Something else that needs to be said – or at least deserves to be said. I just need to think of the way to word it.
troubled diva 