Babies R' Us

Having kids is hard work. Hard bloody work. I look at the time we spend gathering and tending the kids and compare it to commitments that friends of mine without kids have and the difference is frightening.

A decision to have children is the most major of all lifestyle choices and one the magnitude of which I don’t think people really appreciate when taking it. Or maybe they do and just carry on regardless because if you sat down to clinically weigh everything up, there is a lot to frighten you away from having children. This is one area where some creative rationalisation is required, not so much a leap as an orbit of faith. It precludes so much else.

It is an admission that all those things you fantasised about doing, all the places you dreamed of going, the idea of your life being one big freeform bohemian escapade can now be put on hold until you clamber to the top of the other side of the baby canyon. You find yourself doing the sums in your head - “well the youngest is five so he’ll be self sufficient in thirteen years at which stage I’ll be fifty. Grand still young enough to go inter railing.” Or maybe not, will people look at me like I’m some sort of mutant? Better bring the wife too, to deflect the withering glances and provide some shred of credibility.

Each stage of a kid’s development provides it’s own unique challenges. The newborn requires constant supervision and having no concept of day or night will think nothing of interrupting your hard earned deep sleep with demands for food and a clean diaper. This continues for a few months until the first breakthrough - when he can hold his own bottle. Oh the joy of being able to set him up snugly amongst a bunch of pillows, get the angles right and leave him at it while you get the head down again. But let’s be honest all you’re really doing is getting the head down again, you never really allow yourself to return to deep slumber because you know that soon enough you’ll have to rouse yourself again to perform burping duty. The process is not complete until he sends forth a reverberating belch, the hooter at the end of mealtime, a return to sleep for all.

You have to wait a while for the next great leap forward. There are milestones along the way of course - first steps, first words but none of these really make your life any easier, in fact it‘s just the opposite. Overseeing them walking is way more complicated than pushing a buggy - all the risk analysis and hazard assessment, hovering over them, hanging back a bit, breaking into a sprint when you spot some imminent peril, relaxing again, slowly and stealthily being diverted from your original course until you find yourself in the middle of a Laurel bush chasing a sweet wrapper. And we all know when speech arrives, questions aren’t far behind. An ability to provide timely and detailed responses to these most abstract of questions which satisfy the child himself should surely be introduced as a criterion available to the Nobel judging panel.

No, the next rung on the ladder to self sufficiency is self dressing. The halleluiah chorus plays at full volume in your head the day you see your four year old, first of all, locate his clothes and, secondly, put them on in the correct order, right side out. From that moment on the request “Hey buddy could you go get dressed please” is not greeted with grumpy protestations of ignorance but a gentle hum of acquiescence.

At that point he also assumes responsibility for his own wardrobe management, the time thus freed up for you compounding even further. No more probing under beds and behind couches for errant socks and underwear, no more fraught quests to locate missing uniform components at ten past nine on a Tuesday morning when you still have three lunches to make, two batches of homework to sign off on, money for dancing classes to locate and parent teacher meeting acknowledgement slips to find and return. Responsibility for crucial decisions regarding the readiness of a particular item for the washing machine is typically also delegated at this point which, when you’re dealing with boys at any rate, results in comparatively low wash loads. In my experience a garment needs to be in a fairly sorry state before a boy under ten will consign it to a laundry basket.

You then enter into a barren few years without much significant progress on the me time front. First Communions come and go, games consoles are traded in and upgraded, bicycles get bigger.

And then one day it happens, out of the blue. You had long since forgotten about the way your heart was warmed by the bottle holding or self dressing landmarks. You thought there would never be another event to bestow such a scale of benevolence or well being upon you. And then ten year old sidles up to you and suggests that, when required, he could cycle the mile and a bit up to the shop for you for basic things such as milk, bread, firelighters, isotonic drinks and so on. Your first instinct is to dismiss it as being far too fraught with danger and unknown hazards. But you stop yourself and begin to appreciate the symbiosis such an arrangement could create.

He gets a sliver of much yearned for independence and you get back the chunk of your life that is currently given over to loading everyone into the car in all types of weather to go to the shop to get items that slipped through the cracks of the weekly shop. It’s time consuming and depressing. It’s a chore you can let ten year old take from you and in the process come across as the hero who is granting him a bit of freedom. It’s the perfect storm of goodwill.

You follow him the first couple of times to reassure yourself that everything falls within the acceptable risk management framework and he doesn’t fall foul of any rabid dogs or delinquent cattle. Not a bother. You’ve had a taste and now you want more but you have to remind yourself he’s only ten, it will be at least five more years before he can baby sit. This will have to do. For now.

Artists, writers, musicians all take on ambitious projects which by way of consuming so much energy and passion are translated into their bodies of work. What defines them, what remains after them as a testament to a creative and disciplined mind. We look at people like that and conclude that the regimen required for such endeavour is way beyond us. But many of us bring up children without giving the process much thought. What about that process requires any less discipline, any less hard work, any less creativity, any less relentless self motivation than that required to produce a series of epic novels?

A family is a living, breathing body of work. A testament to a life fully lived. The only mistake we make is in trying to hurry it up, in viewing it’s creation as some other option foregone. Is there really anything else you would rather be doing?