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| Parenting Early Years |
You were going to split up with her soon anyway. You don't want to sell your nifty bachelor's car and buy a Volvo. Everyone has his reasons. They are all good reasons, and they are all the same. It's all a bit too much like hard work.
To which your partner will say something like. 'That's totally selfish'. And what if it is?
You are a hunter-gatherer. It is your job to be selfish, when strangling a deer with your bare hands. And right now you would prefer to eat all that deer meat yourself, rather than having to give the best bits to young Jocasta or Kelly-Marie or Sid. (And isn't wanting to have children every bit as selfish as not wanting to? It is, but she will say that she is driven by fundamental biological needs, whereas you are just lazy and feckless. There is no winning this argument, although we all give it a go hundreds of times.)
Viewed from your current state of comfort (soon to end) there is no obvious upside to parenthood. Children are nasty, brutish and short. They are also expensive, malodorous and excessively fond of fish fingers. You have seen friends of yours, once young and vibrant, who within months of childbirth have been reduced to wizened, elderly husks, shorn of all hope and facing almost certain bankruptcy when the next credit card bill arrives.
Years have passed: you have seen the men grow fat and complacent, the women become bitter and start eating Ryvita. Everyone shouts at each other all the time. Their sex life, so far as you can determine, has ceased. Having done what they were designed to do - create a screaming small child - their organs have withered and, in extreme cases, vanished completely. These are the people who now hang out in DIY shops, glumly eying up planks.
Before all this happened to me, I believed implicitly that people had children because it was the best way of filling up time. If you haven't time to do anything else or think of anything else, you are less likely to brood on the desperate pointlessness of human existence, and so leap to your death off the nearest bridge.
Only by exhausting yourself into premature old age can you still these doubts and anxieties, for then even the most meagre treat becomes something to savour. At my local pub I used to see a father of two who had managed to escape for perhaps 45 minutes to enjoy a pint of bitter, which he consumed in silence with a manly tear in his eye. No one talked to him. No one wanted to disturb him. Sometimes he would finish his drink too quickly.
You could see him wrestling with his conscience. Did he have time for another quick half? Could he afford it? He was a successful writer with a healthy and ever-expanding income, but you would never have guessed it by the way he peered pitifully at his handful of small change. Every extra sip, you felt, would tear a disposable nappy off his youngest son's freezing body. And so, head bowed, he trudged out, sighing like a corpse expelling its last breath of air. He wasn't the most glowing advertisement for the joys of fatherhood. To find out more, you can check out Parenting Early Years.