Parenting is that grey area between inviting complete strangers to live in your house and shaping your own friends out of papier maché.
An age past, and responsible parenting amounted to little more than being in a calm and contemplative frame of mind at the moment of conception, when animal spirits were conveyed from father to son. Today, we are reminded regularly that our baldness, digestive problems, and tendency to suffer strokes will be safely preserved in our offspring, and yet that our values and personality are left unwritten in our genes, and play no part in the (embryonic) shaping of our children. To have a child is to bring a radically new point of view into the world, and parenting becomes a kind of unlikely photography: exposure to us makes our children our own. To parent is to hope that the light of one’s own gestures and manner will make up one’s child’s principle source of illumination.
Hence many of us, in making a list of Things To Do in life, put ‘having children’ towards the end; somewhere between ‘reach a state of exhausted disgust from travel, parties and friendships’, and death. For the kind of dedication and attention that the exposure-model of parenting demands appears incompatible with living one’s own life. We have grown to have a horror that unfulfilled desires and lost experiences will plague us after we have had our children, and that the sacrifice of our own time will be unbearable to us.
Yet few of us would insist that children thrive when raised by parents that have already had their fill of life; parents whose adventures are completed, whose wildness has wholly ceased. If we spend through all our dreams and interest in the world before having children, then we will be empty of the desires and passions that we want most to give them. Perhaps then, there is no ideal age or time of life in which to have children; but rather, we should have children when we are taking the greatest pleasure and interest in our existence.
John Lidwell-Durnin is a freelance journalist. He is currently co-authoring a book on education and the will to know. Visit his blog at: http://considerthegourd.wordpress.com/
Sue Gerhardt author of Why Love Matters (2004) and Selfish Society: How We All Forgot to Love Each Other and Made Money Instead (2010) will be leading an event on parenting on Wednesday 4 May at The School of Life. For more information, please click here.
Well said! I thought kids would tie me down - and to a certain extent they have. But they have also opened a new, exciting, challenging, and joyous chapter to my life.
Posted by: Dallin S. Durfee | April 15, 2011 at 03:39 PM