I have no idea if I will ever have kids. At the tender age of 27 I still don't really feel like a grown-up, so I don't feel like producing a living thing to mould into a functioning member of society is something I'm cut out for yet.
Whenever you say you're not sure if you want kids people jump to the immediate conclusion that you hate every last one of them. "Children?! Pah!" I imagine they imagine me shouting angrily, strangling fistfuls of disposable income, "only good place for them is the workhouse, I say!" This isn't the case. I like kids. Most of them, anyway. More often than not it's not the kid I'm getting annoyed at when I'm out and about getting annoyed at things - it's their stupid parents. Not all parents mind you, just the particularly bad ones I seem to encounter in Superdrug. Which is partly why I'm hesitant about becoming one - I'm afraid of being one of those parents. I can imagine myself being one of those parents who is just exasperated with their sprog all the time and continually throwing illogical rules and unfair telling-offs at them out of spite at their very existence. "Stop showing off!" I would bellow as they cry over the hand they've just lost in a thresher because I wasn't doing my parenting properly. Why does my child keep wailing? Why did I give my child access to dangerous farming equipment? What's wrong with me?
The fact that I like kids is exemplified in a relatively new addition to my cabal of like-minded idiots. My friends had a kid and I am fascinated by him. The concept of him amazes me. He's a living representation of how astounding life can be and he's going to be there forever. Like, that's it now, he's there and he won't go away. Not that I want him to, I'm just bowled over at the idea of there being a new human where there wasn't one before. He wasn't human when I first met him, though. Mere days after he'd been properly assembled he lookedweird. Not bad-weird like a pig with 'Hitler' written on it, just a bit strange. A little shaved monkey. All newborn babies look like that - as if they've only just read about evolution a week before they're born, in the womb-library, and decided they'd better catch up with the rest of us before they make their entrance.
What was also weird was the way he acted. Again: it's totally normal, but it's infinitely entertaining to watch up close as this little bag of reactions flaps his arms around, balls his tiny hands into fists that suddenly explode open like time-lapsed flowers, blinks (somtimes one eye after the other), sticks his tongue out and kicks his legs wildly in a fashion that seems to alarm him a bit. You get to see a new human experiencing everything you've come to take for granted for the first time. As time has gone on I've seen him regularly and every time he's bigger and more responsive. He's gone from shaved monkey to adorable, expressive tiny man. I've watched him learn that he is, in fact, in control of his body. Sort of. I've watched his movements becoming more voluntary as he's stopped simply reacting and started interacting - grabbing at things not because his body is reaching out for something to cling to for security, but because he wants to see how something feels. As long as it's not a ball of open scissors sellotaped together then I'm happy to watch rather than intervene. Now he doesn't just cry instinctively because his stomach is empty and his body is telling him to panic or die - he's making noises because he likes the sound of his own voice. He likes the sound of other people's voices too, doing his best to imitate the strange, multisyllabic bollocks that all the bigger people around him are spouting.
This looks like it's going to keep going, continuing on a steady course like a reliable tractor. Soon he'll be saying words. Not real ones, ones he's made up that sound vaguely like what everyone else is saying. But then he'll go and learn again. He'll start to repeat the words, he'll understand what they mean and he'll cobble together rudimentary sentences in order to make unreasonable demands. For a while hell believe that we all exist to serve him but, hopefully, hell grow out of it and understand that everyone else is a whole person with their own wants and needs too. I say hopefully because theres an alarming number of folks who never seem to learn that particular lesson.
Pretty soon, too soon, probably, he'll be a 27 year old man like me. He'll do all the stupid things I did as I grew up - maybe even more, hopefully a lot less. He'll be a fully thinking, functioning, feeling human being with thoughts, opinions and a voice. He's now a permanent fixture, but one that shape-shifts every few weeks into something slightly more advanced like the ultimate Pokemon. Im happy to have this addition to the circle of people I like to keep around, Im happy to be someone who he always recognises and knows is there, and Im happy to teach him swear words in secret for him to blurt out in front of his parents while I laugh in the other room.
Whenever you say you're not sure if you want kids people jump to the immediate conclusion that you hate every last one of them. "Children?! Pah!" I imagine they imagine me shouting angrily, strangling fistfuls of disposable income, "only good place for them is the workhouse, I say!" This isn't the case. I like kids. Most of them, anyway. More often than not it's not the kid I'm getting annoyed at when I'm out and about getting annoyed at things - it's their stupid parents. Not all parents mind you, just the particularly bad ones I seem to encounter in Superdrug. Which is partly why I'm hesitant about becoming one - I'm afraid of being one of those parents. I can imagine myself being one of those parents who is just exasperated with their sprog all the time and continually throwing illogical rules and unfair telling-offs at them out of spite at their very existence. "Stop showing off!" I would bellow as they cry over the hand they've just lost in a thresher because I wasn't doing my parenting properly. Why does my child keep wailing? Why did I give my child access to dangerous farming equipment? What's wrong with me?
The fact that I like kids is exemplified in a relatively new addition to my cabal of like-minded idiots. My friends had a kid and I am fascinated by him. The concept of him amazes me. He's a living representation of how astounding life can be and he's going to be there forever. Like, that's it now, he's there and he won't go away. Not that I want him to, I'm just bowled over at the idea of there being a new human where there wasn't one before. He wasn't human when I first met him, though. Mere days after he'd been properly assembled he lookedweird. Not bad-weird like a pig with 'Hitler' written on it, just a bit strange. A little shaved monkey. All newborn babies look like that - as if they've only just read about evolution a week before they're born, in the womb-library, and decided they'd better catch up with the rest of us before they make their entrance.
What was also weird was the way he acted. Again: it's totally normal, but it's infinitely entertaining to watch up close as this little bag of reactions flaps his arms around, balls his tiny hands into fists that suddenly explode open like time-lapsed flowers, blinks (somtimes one eye after the other), sticks his tongue out and kicks his legs wildly in a fashion that seems to alarm him a bit. You get to see a new human experiencing everything you've come to take for granted for the first time. As time has gone on I've seen him regularly and every time he's bigger and more responsive. He's gone from shaved monkey to adorable, expressive tiny man. I've watched him learn that he is, in fact, in control of his body. Sort of. I've watched his movements becoming more voluntary as he's stopped simply reacting and started interacting - grabbing at things not because his body is reaching out for something to cling to for security, but because he wants to see how something feels. As long as it's not a ball of open scissors sellotaped together then I'm happy to watch rather than intervene. Now he doesn't just cry instinctively because his stomach is empty and his body is telling him to panic or die - he's making noises because he likes the sound of his own voice. He likes the sound of other people's voices too, doing his best to imitate the strange, multisyllabic bollocks that all the bigger people around him are spouting.
This looks like it's going to keep going, continuing on a steady course like a reliable tractor. Soon he'll be saying words. Not real ones, ones he's made up that sound vaguely like what everyone else is saying. But then he'll go and learn again. He'll start to repeat the words, he'll understand what they mean and he'll cobble together rudimentary sentences in order to make unreasonable demands. For a while hell believe that we all exist to serve him but, hopefully, hell grow out of it and understand that everyone else is a whole person with their own wants and needs too. I say hopefully because theres an alarming number of folks who never seem to learn that particular lesson.
Pretty soon, too soon, probably, he'll be a 27 year old man like me. He'll do all the stupid things I did as I grew up - maybe even more, hopefully a lot less. He'll be a fully thinking, functioning, feeling human being with thoughts, opinions and a voice. He's now a permanent fixture, but one that shape-shifts every few weeks into something slightly more advanced like the ultimate Pokemon. Im happy to have this addition to the circle of people I like to keep around, Im happy to be someone who he always recognises and knows is there, and Im happy to teach him swear words in secret for him to blurt out in front of his parents while I laugh in the other room.