UPFRONT: CAN I START out by saying that I like children. Quite a lot, particularly once they start talking. I often find them the most entertaining people at a party, possibly because they don't tend to talk about themselves nearly as much as their parents do.
To clarify: I’m not on a rant against parents in general. There are plenty of parents – my own in particular – whose doting on their offspring I find positively winning. In fact, many of my close friends manage entire conversations without mentioning their chisellers, at least until I inquire. Because, you see, I am interested in children.
Little people are a hoot, and the little people spawned by people I knew when they were little people are even more amusing. Yet the truth is, my interests are varied and friends with offspring increasingly numerous, so in my personal brain-space, there’s a good chance your particular child takes up less room than breakfast. Although I don’t talk about breakfast nearly as much.
But now I’ve offended you. I can just hear the irate e-mails whirring through cyber space to my inbox. Because, forget Lisbon: there’s nothing that can divide the world like children. There’s the haves – parents, as they’re more commonly known – and the have nots – aka people unable to truly love (a statement usually followed with a compassionate sigh and pat of own progeny’s fair head).
If it’s not already abundantly clear, I fall into the latter category, at least at present, although I’m reserving the right to switch sides in the future. And if that day comes, then I’m assuming there’ll be some kind of apple-eating moment, and everything will suddenly become clear. Isn’t that how it works?
Any have-not readers will be familiar with the conversation, where you express an opinion about child-rearing or the like, and some breeder in the group smugly pulls out the trump card and all your arguments come to naught: you don’t have children, ergo you do not understand.
Okay then. Let’s set aside the fact that it’s just plain rude to dismiss someone’s point with a declaration that they can’t comprehend what’s under discussion. But surely one can opine on an experience without actually having gone through it? I mean, every time somebody has a view about how Brian Cowen is running the country I’m hardly going to jump down their throat with a: “You’ve never been a former-finance minister from Offaly in charge of a nation who never actually voted you in. What would you know?”
Of course, there are things I will not fully comprehend about child-rearing until I have a child. Just as there are things that people with children do not appear to understand about how people without them feel when the only topic of conversation on offer involves minors, yet they’re not allowed participate or change the subject.
Here’s the thing: a bore is a bore. Someone who can only talk about one thing, that relates specifically to his/her own experience, is a bore. Having children does not provide you with a special dispensation from this.
Nor, for that matter, does not having children. In fact, if you’ve already turned the page here, I personally stand accused. And furthermore, I freely admit that to lump all parents together as child-obsessed single-subject drones is a smidgen disingenuous. Some parents are as cool as their kids, only bigger. Then again, other parents are so self-righteous they’re not only down on the childless, but they give other parents a hard time for not being parenty enough.
A friend of mine, who shall remain nameless in case the parent police get on her ass, recently admitted, while under the influence of a truth serum (2006 Merlot, if you must know), to an occasional desire to flush her son down the toilet. “I’m not actually going to flush him down the toilet, obviously,” she clarifies. But she’s not allowed talk about it, she tells me conspiratorially, because to do so would be tantamount to a full-blown admission that she’s not a good mother. It’s the kind of comment, she explains, that could have her on Jerry Springer if it fell into the wrong ears.
Naturally, as we have already established, I do not understand what it is to be a good mother. But I’d like to think I know something about being a good person, which as far as I remember has something to do with not judging other people’s decisions. But who am I kidding? I’m judging all the time – the mothers whom I personally deem to be too much in love with their children, the fathers who aren’t in love with their children enough, the women who change their name when they get married. (Okay, I just slipped that one in. Whoops.) Meanwhile, they’re judging me for being too busy with juggling my social calendar to get busy with the breeding. And now they’re judging me (quite rightly, too) for judging them.
All I’m saying is, we’re all on the same side here. Having children, as I’m constantly being reminded, is really hard. And not having children sometimes is really hard. Neither is a perfect life choice, nor is it even a choice in many cases. So let’s all just admit that nobody really understands much about child-rearing at the end of the day, and nobody has the final world, be they have or have not. Except me. Because it’s my column. And now can we change the subject?